


that dwell in dust

by flirtygaybrit



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Gardens & Gardening, Kryptonian Biology, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-24 18:36:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 52,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20019145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flirtygaybrit/pseuds/flirtygaybrit
Summary: Things are different after Clark Kent returns to the world: tainted things are made beautiful once more, a long-dormant seed begins to grow, and eventually, nature reclaims its own.Or: Clark plants a garden, Victor keeps a terrible secret, and Bruce faces the consequences of bringing someone back from the dead.





	that dwell in dust

**Author's Note:**

> For my fantastic friends and partners Kinko, whose FANTASTIC RENAISSANCE PORTRAIT [can be found here](https://gg-kinko.tumblr.com/post/186757911735/title-that-dwell-in-dust-author-flirtygaybrit), and TKodami, who also made GORGEOUS COVER ART and HEADER [right here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20101165) AND created the gorgeous floral printer ornaments that can be seen below. Without these two, this ridiculous premise would have stalled and sputtered out long ago. Thank you for being the most wonderful partners, enablers, and providers of terrible watering jokes an author could ask for. <3 

It was summertime in Kansas, and Clark Kent was dead.

He’d known it for a while—a few days, or maybe longer than that—and it was uncomfortable to acknowledge in the dark, empty space of his mind. Who else in the world had the misfortune of being able to recognize that they were still in a world that they could no longer be part of? 

Who else would deserve it?

Clark took a deep breath. There was no air moving through his lungs, nor any discernible movement from his body. Hell, there was no proof that he even really occupied a body at all. Maybe he was beyond that now. Maybe it had been so long that the universe had reclaimed everything that made him up, leaving him a lost consciousness floating in some unfathomably vast space. Or maybe he was simply alone. Neither thought was particularly upsetting. Death for Clark was a simple truth, and it wasn’t like he could argue with the facts. 

The facts, on that note, were as follows: one, he had been distrusted, hated, defamed; two, he had pushed ahead, barreling headfirst into this fate because it had felt like he had nowhere else to go; and three, he was now dead, and there was nothing he could do about the rest. Death was helplessness wrapped up in an endless darkness, tied up nicely with a neat bow embroidered with resignation.

Clark laughed. Or he didn’t. There was no sound, no air moving over his vocal cords. He couldn’t laugh any more than he could open his eyes and see what was around him. There was no heat, no cold, no soft coffin lining against his skin. The darkness felt skin-tight, palpable and restrictive in the way that his suit never was. He couldn’t tell if he was blinking his eyes, or if the darkness had simply sealed them shut, or if he even had eyes left to blink open.

But he could hear.

It was strange, hearing without seeing or feeling, and at first he wasn’t sure that he was hearing anything at all; there was no noise, so to speak, nothing that seemed to approach his consciousness from an external source. It felt like the sound was coming from inside, a dull sound like static noise, like the sound of his thoughts caught in an echo chamber, only Clark knew the sound of his thoughts couldn’t possibly grow louder, and that was what this sound did, a static hiss that drew closer and closer, filling his mind until its crescendo was all he could hear… and then it was quiet again, and Clark could do nothing but shiver and replay the sound in his mind, looping it over and over until he recognized where he’d heard it before: 

rain. 

It was rainfall that he heard, the roar of a thousand drops pattering against the ground. There was no telling how long it had actually been since he’d heard the sound of rain. He remembered listening to rain as a child, learning to experiment with his abilities when they’d been foreign and exciting and terrifying all at once. Clark could hear the sound of a single raindrop hitting a leaf from over a mile away when he was still alive, but he had no true senses to focus here, wherever here was; all he heard was the distant hiss, the silence, and the roar as the rain reverberated in his mind. He imagined that it was the material world communicating with him. Maybe a storm had passed overhead, or beneath him, or… well, it was hard to say where precisely a storm cloud might travel in relation to him now, but it soothed him for a time to picture the sky, to imagine himself floating weightless in a cloud.

Then, one day, the rain was no longer all he could hear. From the void came a whisper, speaking unintelligible words to him in the soft silences that cradled his consciousness between rainfalls, and Clark found himself playing the sound until the whispers became a crescendo of their own, once voice becoming two becoming many many more; in his mind it became the chittering of insects, unseen creatures burrowing through the black. As a child the insects in the Kansas dirt had fascinated Clark, captivating his attention once he’d learned to pinpoint the sound of a caterpillar chewing a leaf, to track the paths of worms several feet beneath him, to hear the sounds of grubs that gnawed through rotting flesh.

Clark grimaced. He could hear them all around him: maggots feasting on corpses, worms tunnelling by. The chorus of the underground. 

But they weren’t feasting on him.

Because he wasn’t dead.

The thought came to him without warning, and Clark was so startled by it that he reached upward, pushing through tangible earth with ease, and it astonished him that he hadn’t thought to do it before. Of course he wasn’t dead, he was simply buried, and he was growing stronger with that knowledge, pushing aside clumps of cool, damp dirt as he crawled toward the surface. He could feel the sun’s power now, even in the depths of the earth where the sun couldn’t reach, and as he pulled himself toward it his hand breached the surface at last, letting in the first light Clark had seen in a very long time. It blinded him, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut, and as the light grew red behind his eyelids Clark woke with a start, and the world came crashing back in: voices, hundreds of thousands of voices, the sounds of televisions and car engines and airplanes overhead, the roar of a rainstorm beating against the window, the soft red glow from his digital alarm clock.

Clark shut it all out. He’d practiced that, too, when his powers had been foreign and exciting and terrifying, and slowly he let the sensory information trickle back in. He blinked his eyes open and focused on the inside of Lois’s apartment, the same stucco ceiling and brick wall and plush duvet that he remembered from the time before his absence. He let in the soft sound of Lois’s breathing, then the gentle patter of the rain against the window, and let them drown out the sound of his heart thudding wildly in his chest until the sound blurred into white noise, a familiar, comforting roar.

Fact number four: It was summertime in Metropolis, and he wasn’t trapped beneath six feet of sun-baked Kansas soil.

He was alive.

For a man of his size, Bruce Wayne had the lightest footfalls Clark had ever not-heard. Had Clark been anyone else, Bruce might have simply sounded like the errant rustling of long grass, but the whisper of wheat and stalks in a gentle breeze was one that Clark had known for most of his life. Had Clark been anyone else, he might not have known he was being followed at all.

But Clark wasn’t anyone else, and despite Bruce’s shadow-like presence, it was still startlingly easy to tell that it was Bruce who had followed him away from the house, out through the fields and into the small cemetery on the hill. There were a great many details about him that Clark had catalogued unconsciously, despite the relatively short amount of time he’d actually spent with Bruce, but as he drew nearer to the mound of earth that had spent the past three days baking in the sun, he found his attention to detail slipping away, his focus shifting to the yawning hole that lay before him.

Three days. The world had barely begun to realize that it was in the midst of shifting once again, and Clark himself still wasn’t entirely certain about the events that had transpired. He’d found himself thrust into the midst of things so suddenly that all he’d had time to do was act.

No, that wasn’t right. He’d had to trust first, act second. There was no time to debate whether the great creature known as Steppenwolf truly meant the world harm or whether he could be reasoned with. No time to formulate a plan, to play to everyone’s individual strengths, to unite as a team. He’d participated blindly, not because he knew them, but because—

“A closed-casket memorial would have made things less complicated,” said Bruce from a few feet behind Clark. He took a step forward. Clark continued to gaze into the grave. The Kansas heat had dried the walls that had been carved into the ground, and Clark could hear, over the whine of the summer insects, the sound of underground life—beetles in the soil, grubs far beneath the earth, their sound muffled by wood and coffin lining. 

“Sorry?”

“They saw your face. A cover story could have been plausible enough if the body hadn’t been on display. Mangled remains, mistaken identity. Some poor unidentified civilian just close enough to your height and weight to make it convincing.”

The idea of putting an anonymous casualty in the ground in his stead made Clark’s stomach churn. “Sounds like you’ve put some thought into this,” he said, and despite the uncomfortable idea, he found himself relieved when Bruce stepped up next to him. Now he didn’t have to turn back to look at Bruce’s expression, or turn sideways to see the nonchalant shrug of Bruce’s shoulder. 

“Doesn’t hurt to have a plan.”

Clark straightened up. “Bruce, we couldn’t have planned for this. And… come on, you’ve already given me more than enough. I can’t let you spin some story to give me my identity back.”

“If it helps, that’s not what I’m here for,” Bruce said. He reached for the outstretched handle of the shovel that had stuck out from the mound of dirt. “But I can help you bury this one.”

Then he picked up the shovel.

“Bruce, you don’t have to—”

“I know,” Bruce said. He stuck the spade into the earth, lifted it without so much as a noticeable change in blood pressure, and dumped it into the open grave. The soil slid from the metal blade with a faint ringing noise, and the thud of the earth below made the hair on Clark’s arms stand on end.

Clark blinked, swallowed, watched, and waited, but Bruce didn’t ask for help. He simply continued to shovel load after load of sun-baked dirt into the empty grave, seemingly intent on filling the hole he’d created in this tiny Smallville hillside. He must have been the one who did most of the digging. Though it had only been a few days, Clark had gotten the idea that Diana hadn’t been the most keen on the idea of bringing him back. It had been Bruce that Lois had pointed a finger at, when they’d had enough time to sit down and speak about the events leading up to his—his—

But Lois hadn’t needed to say anything. Clark had known. In a macabre and frankly unsettling way, it made sense that only the man who had tried so desperately to murder him would be the one desperate enough to drag him from the grave.

He watched for a few minutes longer, but it seemed sad and a little unnerving that Bruce seemed so intent on filling this hole with him here.

Clark glanced back at the house, then looked at Bruce and sighed. “Let me help, at least,” he said, reaching for the shovel, and found Bruce jerking away as if burned. But Bruce didn’t say anything; he stared at Clark, as though it hadn’t crossed his mind that this was not a task that he needed to undertake alone—or at all—and after a few seconds of appraising Clark’s open, outstretched palm, he handed the shovel over and nodded curtly.

It took only a few seconds for Clark to push the remainder of the dirt pile into the grave. When he was finished, the dirt was still a good foot and a half below ground level. The coffin, Clark realized, was not there to occupy volume in the grave, which was now a dark rectangle of freshly-turned earth speckled with clumps of grass and weeds that had grown over the gravesite over the past year.

“Thank you,” he said to Bruce, and he meant it. “I know I said it already, but… I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

He could hear Bruce swallow, hear the creak of his teeth pressing together, see the visible clench of his jaw. Anger?

But Bruce simply smiled at him. He was handsome in the Kansas sun, as well-rested and open as Clark had ever seen him, and yet he wore the pained expression of a wounded animal. He didn’t strike Clark as the kind of person who was unaware of what emotion he broadcasted to the world. Whatever this was, Bruce wanted him to see it.

“Don’t mention it,” he said, and in an instant his demeanour changed; his shoulders relaxed, and he sank the shovel into the ground and looked at Clark again with that same blithe expression he’d used at the house. “Let’s go make ourselves useful.”

To Bruce’s surprise, Martha invited him for dinner.

With the house still mostly packed up and the silverware nowhere to be found, it wasn’t the idyllic country supper that Bruce had always imagined a rural family might enjoy; it was pizza on the front porch instead, cooled from the drive out of town and reheated with the help of Clark’s apparently non-radioactive built-in heat source, and Lois Lane and Clark sat on the front step with his mother, who had refused to take the chair Bruce was now sitting in.

She was proving herself to be just as stubborn as her son. Bruce wasn’t allowed to pay for any of it.

It was cool enough to enjoy being outdoors now that the sun had drifted toward the horizon. Bruce’s jacket lay abandoned, draped over the railing near Clark’s head, and he’d rolled up his sleeves shortly after shedding it earlier in the afternoon, when he and Clark had rejoined the movers in shuttling the rest of the Kents’ furniture and belongings into the house. There was even a dog.

It was very dissimilar to Gotham, and exactly nothing like he’d expected from a family that had kept secret the existence and identity of the most powerful man on the planet.

“And what about you?” Martha asked, squinting up at Bruce from the stairs. “A big-city man. You watch sports, don’t you?”

They’d only just established that Smallville’s local baseball team was recovering from last year’s terrible playoff series. Clark was invested in things like those, apparently.

“Well, I’ve been told I sponsor a few,” Bruce replied without thinking, resting his paper plate against his thigh. He’d likely have grease stains on his pants when he lifted it, but these people didn’t seem the type to mind. “As for watching or playing, I think the only thing that comes to mind is—”

“Hang gliding,” Clark suggested. He caught Bruce’s eye for a split second and returned to feeding a portion of his pizza directly to the dog while Martha nodded, satisfied, a faint smile wrinkling the corners of her eyes.

Bruce chuckled.

“You look like the risk-taking type,” Martha said decisively. Lois, a few steps down, didn’t look at her pizza quickly enough to hide a smile. “So what’s your story, anyway?”

Clark cleared his throat before Bruce could even process the question. “Mom, we don’t need to—”

“I’m only curious,” she said, lifting her arms placatingly. Her plate was still clutched in one hand, and a crust began to slowly slide toward the edge. “You went your whole life thinking you were the only one who wore a cape, and then…”

“Then Clark moved to Metropolis, which is just across the bay,” Lois explained, causing Clark to look away from the dog. “I think it was an organic meeting. Work overlap. I guess it happens more often than any of us expected.”

Diplomatic. Bruce would have to thank her later.

Martha seemed to digest this information. “Oh,” she said, her face set with certainty. “Is that what you people call turf wars over in that place?”

“C’mon, we don’t have to talk about this right now,” Clark said, exasperated. “It’s been a long day for everyone, Lois has to fly back in the morning…”

“I have a few days,” Lois clarifies. “I can stay and help with things here.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” she said to Clark, and Bruce found himself remembering her on the day that Clark had reanimated, standing in Heroes’ Park with little more protection than her identity. Had she not disrupted his bewildered retaliation, Bruce and the others would likely have been overpowered, and there was no saying what Clark might have done in his disorientated state.

She’d been more vulnerable than any of them had been, and she’d still managed to gentle Clark and convince him to back down. Bruce would have to thank her again.

“—the cemetery?”

Bruce blinked away the memory and returned to the conversation as Clark said, “Oh, Bruce was helping me fill in that hole. He thought it would be too suspicious if anyone came to visit a loved one and found an open grave out there.”

“Well, it sounds like Bruce is just full of good ideas,” Martha announced with another wry smile. “I sure don’t know what we’d do without all this… this...”

She began to gesture at the house, but trailed off as a sudden tremor took her voice. Martha was not, and if Bruce had his way, would never be aware of the full extent of Bruce’s interactions with the bank and the realtors. More importantly, she did not appear to be aware of the precise details of Bruce’s involvement in Clark’s brief and untimely death. With any luck, she would never find out. Bruce didn’t plan to spend much time with her after this evening anyway. She had a good, simple life, and anything further he brought to it would likely lead to more chaos and complication.

“Well, we couldn’t leave a pile of perfectly good dirt lying around. I told him it would be a nice place for a flowerbed,” Bruce said lightly. “You should be able to spruce it up a little. Maybe plant some flowers there in his memory.”

“That sounds like a beautiful idea,” Lois agreed, but it was Clark that Bruce’s gaze was drawn to; he had a hand on one of Martha’s, leaning in so that his profile was outlined in the sunset’s warm glow, and she was gripping his fingers so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. She steeled herself after a moment, and looked up at Bruce, misty-eyed but radiating warmth.

“Yes, it does,” Martha said. “I think it sounds just lovely.”

“Do you think you’ll stay in Kansas long?”

Clark turned his gaze toward the house. Night had fallen at last, and through the windows they could see Martha and Lois in the process of unpacking.

“As long as she needs me to,” he said.

Bruce nodded. He’d put his jacket back on; a private aircraft was due to arrive any time now, piloted by Alfred and ready to ferry him back to Gotham, but standing here with Clark, surrounded by fields and stars, the city felt worlds away.

“Any plans to go back to Metropolis?”

Clark took a breath and sighed thoughtfully. “You know, I’m not sure yet. I imagine that with you and everyone else out there, the east coast probably has more than its share of heroes keeping an eye on things.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t say that.”

Bruce slid a palm-sized device from his pocket. It was a phone, technically speaking, albeit one with better specs than the average smartphone. This one would display a familiar Kryptonian shield upon powering up, and Bruce would eventually have to admit that this was the proudest he’d been of a communication device in over five years.

“I want you to take this,” he said quietly, holding it out to Clark, and to his surprise Clark stared down at it with furrowed brows.

“Bruce, I can’t—”

“You can,” Bruce said, and surprised even himself by reaching out and pressing it against Clark’s palm. He didn’t need to wrap his fingers around Clark’s. Clark was smart enough to hold it himself when he let go. “Even if you don’t keep it on you, keep it somewhere safe. I’ve been working on this for a while, so if anything happens that we can’t handle on our own, you’ll hear it from this device. I took the liberty of putting Netflix on it, too.”

Bruce chuckled, but he couldn’t be sure whether his humour had landed or not; Clark pressed his lips together and stared down at the phone, turning it over in his hands as he inspected it with obvious uncertainty. After a moment he slipped it into his pocket, and Bruce’s satisfaction ticked upward.

“Thank you.”

“Just thank me by putting it to good use. Even if it takes a while for you to get back in the game, just… know that we’re here for you.”

It was difficult for Bruce not to add that he would be in touch, but he liked the way this sounded. Supportive, but not smothering. Clark could contact them if he wanted. The door would always be open.

Clark nodded again, then held out a hand, and Bruce shook it without hesitation. It didn’t feel quite appropriate, like the feeling of shaking one’s hand at a funeral, or of writing fund cheques for families who had lost loved ones that money couldn’t replace. It didn’t feel personal. It didn’t feel like enough. But Bruce was better with handshakes than he was at goodbyes, so a handshake had to suffice. 

His grip was, to Bruce’s surprise, quite relaxed.

It didn’t feel right, leaving him so soon. There were things about the world that Clark didn’t know, things that Lois and Martha would have to fill him in on, and more things that he would need to seek out for himself. But Bruce knew this wouldn’t be the last he saw of Clark Kent, if only for a few weeks. He could count on Clark to find him by the light in the sky, and in the age of men who could travel at the speed of sound, Kansas wasn’t really all that far away after all.

It took less than a week for Clark to move back to Metropolis.

It wasn’t because he still owed rent in Lois’s apartment (paid off, he later found out, via some vague Wayne Enterprises leftover victims’ fund loophole) or because he wasn’t able to get most of this things back at the farm house (about half—what Martha hadn’t given away to friends and distant relatives). There was only so much for him to do at the farm once the furniture had been rearranged and the chaotic move-in clutter cleaned up, and his mother knew that he’d never be satisfied with staying at home. Clark had been on the move for as long as he remembered, and he’d grown quite fond of being in Metropolis, a city that granted him both anonymity and enough recognition and respect to be left alone… mostly.

Only he was no longer Clark Kent in public; he was simply Superman dressed up like a regular civilian, and considering the brief period of time and speculation since his highly public return, it seemed there was only one place that was suitable for Superman to call his base of operations: the alien craft-turned-Homeland Security stronghold-turned-STAR Labs facility-turned… what, exactly? Sanctuary seemed like a strong word for a place that had been historically dangerous to him, but it was the last piece of Krypton he had left, and although it was the most obvious place for him to be, it was where he was most protected.

And, coincidentally, where everyone else would be the most protected from him.

Things were different in Metropolis, in ways that were both subtle and not. The public emergence of other heroes, other metahumans, had rocked the world in Clark’s absence, and now Metropolis was no longer the only city to boast of a metahuman presence; Wonder Woman popped up all over Europe to save the day with a length of golden rope, Aquaman held the oceans (and had recently become the reluctant ruler of an ancient undersea kingdom that Clark had only discovered recently), and The Flash seemed to be on every continent all at once, despite his landlocked location in Ohio. Even Philly had a superhero of its own now (with a strong social media presence) but despite the concept of a superpowered team that Bruce and Diana had discussed following Clark’s return, it was rare to find any number of them in the same place at the same time, and they were more spread out than Clark had assumed a team of heroes would. 

In fact, aside from Victor, who was too preoccupied with his father at S.T.A.R. Labs to really bother him all that much, Bruce was the closest person to Clark, and Clark could count on one hand the number of times he’d ever seen Bruce in Metropolis. Their schedules and objectives simply didn’t line up, and until recently Clark was convinced that Batman operated only out of Gotham, which was why it surprised him one evening, just over two weeks after his return, to run into Bruce in Metropolis; he was dressed in his best gala attire and had found himself unexpectedly (or, knowing what he knew of Bruce, predictably) smack-dab in the middle of an attempted burglary-slash-hostage-situation that had interrupted Clark in the middle of ordering his favourite Saturday night takeout.

“What is it?” Lois had asked, frowning at the way Clark cocked his head in the direction of the Schaffenberger Gallery on Hillis Street. Over a year later and she still recognized that look on his face.

“It’s… close,” Clark had said, and Lois had given him that looks she always gave him, the one that said it’s okay, we can do this later. Do what you do best.

It was the first time he’d put on his suit since moving back to Metropolis. A different suit, not that anyone would notice; the one his father had revealed to him on the ship had been rendered irreparable, but this one would do.

Clark crashed through the ceiling and stopped just short of the ground, then threw up an arm to deflect the sudden burst of gunfire. The group responsible were no street thugs, obviously; they opened fire on Clark without hesitation, but it didn’t remind him of a panicked burglar’s attempt at getting a shot in before the inevitable surrender; there was something calculated about the way these men were moving, firing at him in waves that seemed almost coordinated, first one round and then another, gunmen alternating so that fire never quite ceased, and above the sound of the gunfire he could hear, deeper beneath the building, the sound of voices, the click of a dial being turned, and in the corner—

Bruce’s voice, low enough that the gunfire and the sound of empty casings hitting the floor would drown it out to anyone else listening: “Superman’s here. I need to get to high ground. Send the suit.”

“It’s already on its way,” Alfred reported via some remote connection in Bruce’s ear, and by the time Clark had already bent three semi-automatics into unusable balloon-animal shapes, Bruce was gone. 

It was the first time Clark had seen him out of the Batsuit in an emergency situation, and the first time he’d really seen Batman outside of Gotham, aside from their misadventures in Russia; he could hear Bruce making his way to the roof, and by the time Batman dropped into the gala, the flashing red-and-blue lights of the MPD could be seen dancing on the walls of the gallery's glass-walled lobby.

“There’s a safe downstairs,” Batman began, and Clark only had to glance downward and shift his vision to verify.

“They’re almost inside,” Clark said, narrowing his eyes at the skeletal structure and heavy Kevlar armour of the man who was kneeling before the safe. “I’ll take care of them.”

“You help the rest of the attendees out,” Batman rasped in his mechanical growl. “I’ll take care of the ones downstairs.”

He turned on his heel and took off running. Alfred was already murmuring schematics and unoccupied routes in his ear.

“They’re armed,” Clark called after him.

Bruce didn’t look back, but Clark heard him reply, low and smug, as though sharing a secret: “So am I.”

They met atop the roof some hours later, when all was safe and quiet. Clark was not sure where Bruce had stored his suit to begin with, but it was Batman who still stood over the edge of the gallery, watching the police crawl around the entrance below.

“If I’d known you were going to be here, I would have stopped to say hello,” Clark said, slowing his descent before touching down on the rooftop. He approached Bruce carefully and looked out over the city, then glanced at Bruce. “How are you?”

“You mean after this mess, or in general?”

Clark waited for Bruce to acknowledge his gaze, then lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Both.”

Bruce turned back to him. Even his eyes were rimmed with black, and crinkled in the corners with faint amusement. Clark couldn’t possibly fathom where he found the time for either. “I have a suggestion for you.”

Great. This would be the first time Bruce told him explicitly to stay out of his way, and now Clark would have to explain that while Bruce considered Gotham to be his domain, superheroes in this day and age were no longer confined to just one area—

“Leave the emergencies to us,” Bruce said.

Clark swallowed, blinked, furrowed his brow. “To… you?”

“Us. Me, Diana. Whoever can get to it soonest. It’s barely been two weeks since you crawled out of the ground. It’s okay if you need to take some time before you come back.”

Clark almost laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“I can,” Bruce said. His mouth was twisted in the approximation of a smile, framed on all sides by the black rim of the cowl, but if he intended it to be encouraging and warm he’d missed his mark. “No one wants to see you overextend yourself when you’re still trying to adjusts to everything. I understand how important it is to you to help, but… whatever happens out here, it doesn’t have to be just you anymore. You’ve been through enough.”

Clark turned to face Bruce properly, inhaled, and opened his mouth to ask where precisely this was coming from. He’d spoken to Lois briefly about feeling maladjusted, and he’d done more Googling and reading in his down time at home than he would ever have admitted; an indignant sputter about the importance of privacy soured in his mouth, an accusation poised on the tip of his tongue like a barbed spear in a ballista, but after a moment he exhaled and drove it out. He desperately wished that he could put into words the urgency and despondence and crushing sense of insufficiency he’d felt since quietly inserting himself back into the heart of Metropolis, to drive into Bruce’s heart the knowledge that he was not weak despite what he’d gone through, that no matter how many people he’d helped in the past and helped here tonight, no matter how many times he made it in time, no matter how many days he’d saved, that there would always be more he couldn’t—

and yet Bruce was still smiling, gazing at him with that expression that Clark could never fully appraise, and he felt the bowstring snap.

“Bruce, I appreciate your help, I really do. But I’ve been doing this as long as you have. I’m fine.”

Bruce simply nodded. He didn’t seem the type to back down so easily, but Clark had experienced little resistance from him so far, and he already had prior experience with Bruce’s persistence. This wouldn’t be the last time Bruce said anything. He was too smart to walk around on eggshells.

“I have faith in you,” he said after a moment. He rested a hand on Clark’s shoulder, squeezed it lightly, and gave another small, encouraging smile before stepping away; within seconds the Batman had melted into the shadows, dissipating in the night sky like smoke, and as Clark gazed out over the city he could hear a newly familiar voice, one filtered through layers of aluminum and carbon fibre and communication relay:

“Perhaps you should consider taking your own advice for a change. You might almost convince him that you believe what you’re saying.”

Alfred. Clark closed his eyes and listened closely. He could pick up the very distant sound of Alfred’s voice beneath the cave, creating a feedback echo as he spoke almost instantaneously through Batman’s communication channel.

“Do you think it would work?” 

“For you or for Master Kent?”

Clark opened his eyes and reigned in his senses, shutting out the chatter of police scanners and the murmur of the crowd and reporters below, and suddenly the world became quiet, crystalline. A breeze blew gently across his face. Trees in the park whispered into the night, and for just a moment, Clark remembered the distant hiss of rain.

It was time to go home.

“Do you think he’s right?”

Lois lifted the coffee pot and carried it to the counter, and Clark watched as a steaming waterfall of dark brown slowly filled up the mug.

“Say when,” she said, and stopped pouring before Clark could even articulate that his stomach had tied itself in too many knots over the very thought of caffeine. “About overextending yourself, you mean? Or that you’ve been through enough that you can let other people handle the world’s crap for a change?”

She began to fill her own mug as Clark curled his fingers around the one resting on the table. Even the smell of it made him grimace. He’d never been a coffee person—at least, had never found himself reliant on the caffeine high—but he forced himself to take a sip anyway. It felt unpleasant in his mouth. Most things had since he’d returned. He’d thought that food would taste better after not eating for so long, but even his favourite foods had brought him little pleasure as of late.

“About any of it.”

Lois left the pot on the kitchen counter and turned off the television, then stood with one hand curled around her mug and cast a contemplative gaze over the rim. “Two years ago, Clark, I wouldn’t have given Bruce Wayne a shred of credibility. Now he’s one of the most credible people we know, if a little…”

“Brash?”

“That’s a word,” Lois said. She took a sip from her mug. “But he has years of experience doing this… helping people. I remember Batman in the early years. He’s been around a long time.”

“Experience doesn’t mean he’s right about me.”

“It doesn’t mean he’s wrong,” Lois said. Clark glanced up, and she continued: “As much as I hate to say it… it’s different this time, Clark. Not just us. Everything.”

Clark’s gaze slipped to the ring on her finger, then looked back into the depths of his mug. The steam swirled gently around his face, and he tried to focus on it for as long as he could. Lois was right too. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but things were already different between them. He loved Lois, could never stop loving Lois, but his desire to have things as they were did not change the fact that where Lois had a year’s worth of grief and mourning, he had nothing. There were new books on her bookshelf, a pile of unfolded laundry in the living room that Clark didn’t recognize, a slightly browning potted plant on the windowsill that gave off a distinct aura of loneliness. Everywhere Clark looked, he found something new, a fresh clue that would inevitably unravel the year that Lois had spent in this new world. 

And for Clark, there was nothing.

There was no year of longing in his memory, no months spent in isolation that he‘d had to push through. There was nothing, and it was so unbelievably hard to go from nothing to something.

“This isn’t how I wanted things to go, Lo. With you, with… them...”

He didn’t have to look up to feel the expression on her face. He’d seen it often enough, through his eyelids when she thought he was sleeping, in the near-imperceptible tremor of her voice when she spoke of Clark’s time below ground.

“It’s not your fault,” she said softly. “You can’t blame yourself.”

“Then who can I blame? Bruce, for bringing me back? Luthor, for making a monster capable of killing me? The rest of the world? How do I blame the world for changing when I wasn’t even a part of it?”

Lois stepped forward, placed her mug on the table, and stood at Clark’s side. He leaned against her, and she wrapped a warm arm around his shoulders as he closed his eyes.

“You were a part of it. They never forgot you. And neither did I.”

Clark swallowed hard. “I’m trying,” he said softly, but couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he was finding it—like drinking coffee, eating pizza, sleeping through the night—harder than it was before.

Things were different.

Her fingers bunched up the fabric of his shirt, and he felt her breath against his scalp as she leaned down and pressed her lips to the top of his head. “You’re still a good man,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “That’s what counts.”

Through the steam of the coffee, he could smell salt, hear the rapid click of her eyelashes, and as Lois held him he gazed at the sad, drooping ivy on the windowsill and pretended to be unaware that they were both trying not to cry.

The skeletal structure of the scout ship, as Clark discovered, was not one of metal or wood or any recognizable construction material that had ever been utilized on earth; it was more similar to chitin than steel and had a name that Clark was unable to pronounce, and it was a naturally-occurring Kryptonian resource that didn’t appear to exist in any usable form in any nearby planets. which meant that any repairs made to the vessel’s core structure would not be simple or straightforward. Although S.T.A.R. Labs had made some minor discoveries about the properties the ship possessed, the parts that had been blown away or crushed or otherwise reduced to rubble had to be melted down and replaced with the aid of the ship’s remaining service robots.

Luckily, there were still a few around, and Clark was glad for the help. The Genesis Chamber was the most time-consuming and complicated to rebuild; it took two days to drain the amniotic fluid, gut the embryo tank, begin mending the bridge, and start the process of scraping away the shriveled remnants of the strange nest of organic tissues and amniotic tubes that had housed and fed not only hundreds of Kryptonian embryos, but also the creature that had threatened the city. 

So for two days, Clark worked alone.

Lois called him on his temporary cell, once around noon on the first day and closer to the evening on the second, just to check in on him, and he reported his progress as the service bots whirred around busily, whisking away pieces of rubble and replacing segments of the ceiling that had been destroyed twice over. Yes, things were going well; no, he wasn’t hungry or tired; yes, it wouldn’t take much longer.

He wasn’t sure why, but the thought of returning home—and he thought of the apartment as home, despite having not lived there (or at all) for well over a year—made his stomach uneasy. Lois was his best friend, and she supported his desire to rebuild, just as she supported Bruce’s advice to take some time off. His _vacation_. Bruce, who was, as far as Clark could tell, in the midst of renovations of his own, had said he’d expected Clark to get back in the game, and that anything important would come through this device. So far, the private line, network, server, or whatever it was had been silent, and as Clark sat in the ship listening to the drone of fluid being pumped and filtered and filtered again, Clark gazed down at it and considered giving Bruce a call. 

“Foreign material detected,” the ship announced, interrupting his thoughts. It was the third time in as many minutes that it had done so. “Would you like a substance analysis?”

It was in the process of filtering out the contaminants that had clouded the pristine amniotic fluid of the embryo tank. Clark was reminded of all the people who had passed through it since the tank was destroyed, dirtying what had once been a pure substance of nourishment: Zod, Luthor, the Zod-Luthor abomination, Bruce and most of his new associates, an innumerable stream of scientists… and likely more, many more that Clark had missed in his year underground. The destroyed coffin, pieces of splintered wood floating about with bits of Kansas soil and sod still clinging to its sides, had simply been the cherry on top, and had in fact still been half-submerged in the fluid when he’d reentered the ship for the first time. With everything that had dirtied the fluid, Clark wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that there were worms swimming around in the depths of that pool before he ever began to clean it out.

“No,” Clark said, gazing into the murky yellow-orange depths of the fluid. He knew that this particular substance had been designed to sustain the lives of the Kryptonians who had been brought aboard the scout ship thousands of years ago. He knew that it had been used by Luthor, tainted by his blood to create that unholy creature. It had also brought him back to life. Whatever was in it, Clark didn’t need to know. He only knew that he had to preserve it. “Just filter everything out if you can. Restore it, purify it, whatever you have to do. Just make sure there’s nothing left. Make it the way it was.”

He tucked Bruce’s communication device back into his pocket and returned to the schematics that the liquid geo had formed behind him.

It had been a long time since he’d been in this chamber long enough to appreciate it. Clark could only vaguely recall what the chamber had looked like beforehand, and found himself wishing that the ship could provide more than a three-dimensional monochrome diorama as a visual aid. He remembered long stalks, glowing orbs, the dark shadows of robots tending to the embryos within. The Genesis Chamber had once housed generations of genetically enhanced and predetermined Kryptonians, and now… now there was only him. 

So much life had been lost because of Clark. Human lives, Kryptonian ones. His own. The thought curdled his stomach, filling his mouth with a sour taste. This was supposed to be a room full of life, and while many things had been born in the ship’s time on earth, it felt to Clark like a room that had been shaded with sorrow and loss.

Oddly enough, it reminded him of Pozharnov, the Russian village that had nearly been destroyed by Steppenwolf’s hand; the planet known as Apokolips had held that small town in its wretched grasp for too long, and still Clark could recall how the wicked shapes of alien flowers had bloomed with life after the presence of Steppenwolf and the parademons had lifted. The town had recovered in the wake of the attack, lush with brilliant and otherworldly flora that had been quickly removed and quarantined by the Russian government. The buildings that had been destroyed were rebuilt, and as far as Clark could tell, the population was even slowly growing now that reconstruction had taken place. It was inspirational to see how such a place could flourish and prosper, how it could grow in spite of the vile touch that had once tainted it.

It was an inspiring thought, and as Clark sat overlooking the empty chamber with its empty tank, he realized that he, too, shared a similar experience. Crude a comparison though it was, someone had placed him the ground, and someone had gripped him and pulled him from it. 

A service robot still floated next to Clark’s head, and after a moment he turned to it and gazed at the three-dimensional xenometal diorama that the robot had created for him.

He was already on vacation. All he needed now was a hobby.

  


Nearly two weeks after Superman’s return, Clark still hadn’t made a public comeback beyond his appearance in Metropolis and his assistance in Russia. Media outlets were quiet; local newspapers and online reporting sites were rife with speculation but contained no hard evidence that Clark had made any attempt to rejoin the world. Diana had reported radio silence from Clark. Lois Lane kept her head down, reporting little on Superman’s return even despite the world’s excited buzzing. Even the detailed and highly specific searches that Bruce had trained on all Superman-related things on social media came up empty, aside from the usual pro- and anti-Kryptonian sentiments, meta-human speculation, and the occasional infographic comparing and contrasting the most well-known aspects of each major metahuman’s skill sets. It was improbable that Clark would have holed himself up in the ship for so long, and even less likely that he could evade detection in the middle of a city that regularly craned its head upward to see Superman zipping through the clouds.

Truthfully, Bruce had hoped that Clark would reach out. They were relatively close in location, and their unintended team-up and subsequent meeting on the roof of the gallery had been the first time they’d been alone together—truly alone, without Lois or Martha or Diana or anyone else to pull their attention away from the inevitable conversation they would need to have—since before Clark’s death. They should have discussed it then. Bruce had spent well over a year contemplating what he would like to say to Clark, should the opportunity arise, and he’d typed a thorough yet neutral email or two to send to him that he’d hoped would open Clark up to the possibility of discussing their history in a civilized manner… and yet he’d never sent them, and with Clark flying under the radar after being encouraged to stand down, he began to think that maybe Clark had no interest in speaking to him.

This was why it took Bruce by surprise when, as he was directing a group of furniture delivery men through a recently-painted hallway on the ground floor of Wayne Manor, his pocket buzzed with a brief alert.

_Hey. I’m still in Metropolis. Sorry for taking so long to reach out but I think I’m ready to meet up. I’m in Heroes Park today if you can spare a minute. Not urgent, it’s okay if you can’t. Barry’s here too._

Bruce stopped where he stood and stared down at the screen. It was a private conversation, not a message that had been sent through the designated group chat that Bruce had set up before giving it to Clark, which meant Clark must have taken the time to investigate his conversation settings and sent it to him directly.

As he reread the message for a third time, a new message appeared on the screen.

_If you happen to be in the area, bring a shovel._

Bruce made an amused sound. Clark certainly knew how to get his attention.

 _Today? Or tonight?_ Bruce responded, and very quickly he received a new message: 

_Yes, I’ll be here._

That seemed to be the end of the conversation, though whether Clark had misinterpreted his question or simply responded tersely on purpose remained to be seen. Bruce could not possibly fathom what use a shovel would be to Clark, especially with the ship and all of its technology in such close proximity, but he was looking forward to finding out.

It was a relief to finally approach the Kryptonian ship without having to break in.

S.T.A.R. Labs was gone. Bruce couldn’t be sure whether Clark himself had put in a polite request to vacate the premises or whether it was simply the polite request that Bruce himself had put in shortly after Superman’s highly public display in Heroes Park, but S.T.A.R. Labs and Homeland Security were no longer welcome to explore the ship at their leisure. It would be the first time he’d been welcomed aboard an alien vessel, and while its previous occupants had moved out, the ship was still surrounded by a government facility.

Bruce had never had any trouble getting into those.

In the evening he dropped from the sky with a shovel in hand, finding his way easily through a hole in the ceiling of the facility that had gone unpatched since Clark’s return. He anticipated Superman’s cape somewhere in his periphery, but instead a bright blur of sparks materialized into a bright-eyed person in front of him: not Clark, but Barry Allen, suited up and clutching a bucket packed with what appeared to be topsoil in both arms.

“Your timing really is terrifying, you know that?”

“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not,” Bruce said, then glanced up, waiting for a second flash of blue to descend from above. If Barry was still here, it meant Clark had to be close by, and he was looking forward to telling Clark that he’d brought a shovel all the way from Gotham. “I assume the bucket means you’re here for the same reason I am. Is he here?”

“He’s inside. There’s still a lot left to do in there, so I hope you brought snacks.” Barry held up his bucket of soil and shook it slightly, walking backwards as Bruce stepped toward the entrance to the ship. Bruce hoped he was implying that the dirt was relevant to the work they were doing and not relevant to the snacks. “I’ve just been dumping this in the Genesis Chamber, so you can start packing it down whenever you’re ready.”

Bruce remembered the Genesis Chamber. He’d only ever stepped foot in it once, and remembered it mostly as a vast space filled with murky liquid and research equipment. S.T.A.R. Labs had discovered that the liquid had possessed dozens of fascinating regenerative and preservative properties, but that fluid and its ability to restart Clark’s dormant cells was the most important detail that Bruce recalled. He was unsure as to the original purpose of the chamber, and had never thought to ask Clark about it until now.

“So why do I need the, ah…?” He lifted his shovel, desperate to find a way out of finishing his question.

“Oh, it’s to fill in the nursery,” Barry said, matter-of-fact. The door opened behind him with a hiss, and together they stepped into the ship’s dark interior, Barry backward and Bruce with mounting intrigue. “Didn’t Clark tell you? He’s terraforming.”

Just as Bruce’s benign smile began to falter, a familiar voice rang out through the ship’s interior: “Landscaping would be more accurate, I think. Terraforming was never my thing.” 

It was Clark, emerging from a hallway on the right that curved away and out of sight, and he looked… good, to Bruce’s relief. A few days’ worth of stubble covered his jaw and throat, and he’d traded his suit and cape for a more casual shirt and pants; even his hair seemed more relaxed, loose and curly and notably missing the severe slick that normally lent Superman his clean-cut, business-like appearance.

“Clark,” Bruce said. Clark smiled warmly and reached out a hand. Bruce wasn’t sure what to do with it—surely they weren’t that formal, given their informal interactions in the past, yet he’d made the mistake of shaking Clark’s hand in Kansas. This was an appropriate greeting and farewell, then. He found himself gripping Clark’s hand firmly, and was pleasantly surprised once again by how relaxed his grip was. He would need to ease up next time. “Nice to see you back in the city again. How’s the vacation going?”

“It’s going well,” Clark said, then turned his attention to Barry. “Why don’t you take a break? I’m going to give him a tour and we’ll start shaping it once the structural reinforcements are in place. Thanks for your help, Barry.”

“Yeah, no trouble. I’ll just, uh.” Barry lifted the bucket, mimed dumping it on its side, and disappeared down the hall in a blur of blue light, leaving Bruce and Clark alone in the ship’s entry chamber.

Clark chuckled quietly and slid his hands into his pockets, and Bruce rested his shovel on the ground and removed his cowl. “So you’re… renovating, I take it?”

“Well, I’m definitely not terraforming,” Clark agreed. “Thanks for agreeing to come, by the way. I know Barry and I could have handled this, but I wanted you go see what I’m doing.”

“I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check in, but… I’m glad to help where I can.” Bruce glanced around, examining his surroundings with mild interest. He wasn’t familiar enough with the ship’s interior to note any major changes that Clark may have made to the ship. The room they were in wasn’t small, but it wasn’t large, either; devoid of the equipment from S.T.A.R. Labs, it mostly just looked empty.

“Still, I appreciate the company. Come with me, I’ll show you what we’ve been up to.” Clark tipped his head toward the T-shaped hallway just outside the chamber, then began to lead Bruce to the right. “I’m sorry for waiting so long to contact you. It’s been a… hectic couple of days.”

“I’m sure. How have things been in Kansas? Is everyone settled in okay? Everything back in its place?”

“Yeah, everything’s moved back in. Mom’s doing well, too. She’s still… we’re still thankful for—”

“Don’t be,” Bruce said as kindly as he could manage. He didn’t like the idea of Clark spending an indeterminate amount of time thanking him in the future. He didn’t want Clark to feel as though he owed a debt. It was quite the opposite in reality. “But keep going. I haven’t heard any Superman stories lately. Have you been keeping your head down?” 

“I’m actually living back here,” Clark said. “That’s why I was able to reach the gallery so quickly.”

“I thought so. And you’ve made this your pet project?”

He indicated the ship around them. An ellipsoidal robot floated past them, whirring gently as it went by, and he had to resist the urge to stop and stare after it.

Clark shrugged. “The ship’s been pretty badly damaged over the last couple years. I figured it could use some fortifying and a good clean-up. Most of the things that were in here have been picked clean by the government and S.T.A.R. Labs, but…”

“I imagine it’s been a difficult task for you.”

“Not really. It seemed like a big task, at first, but it’s just steady work. The ship itself still has an active maintenance crew”—Clark jerked his thumb backwards in the direction of the robot—“sort of. But over the weekend Barry’s been helping me clear some of the mess that was left in here.”

He didn’t have to specify the damage that had been done when Luthor had unleashed his monster upon the world, or the damage that had been done when the Mother Box had been activated in the depths of the chamber. Bruce’s efforts had ultimately resulted in bigger hole in the ceiling than Luthor’s monster had, so it was difficult to tell whether he was referring to the mess left by Luthor, by the scientists, or by Clark himself in the resurrection event. 

“Still, it’s a big vessel. I would have stopped by to help if you’d asked,” Bruce said, unable to keep from wondering whether Clark and Barry had been doing this under their noses all along. He wasn’t yet sure whether he felt excluded, but that was unimportant compared to Clark picking up a new hobby. “I was wondering what you’d been up to while you weren’t saving the world.”

He smiled, but Clark didn’t return the gesture. “Just this so far.”

Things got quiet.

“Have you thought about… moving it? Once you’ve made repairs and it’s up and running?”

“Oh, I don’t imagine it’ll be up and running any time soon. I wouldn’t know where to take it even if I could get it in good enough shape.”

The hallway felt longer than the first time Bruce had navigated this path. They were going toward the Genesis Chamber, that much he’d surmised, but the last time he’d made this trip, he’d been carrying Clark in a coffin.

“Let me know if you ever do. Maybe you can show me how Kryptonians fly.”

They rounded the corner, and on the left was a round doorway sealed off by interlocking pieces that formed a pleasant spiral shape. It was the entrance to the Genesis Chamber, the room that had been utilized to bring Clark back to life—and the same chamber that Luthor had once brought to ruin, that had been desecrated by him and countless other scientists looking to dissect Kryptonian culture and technology—and as the door opened with a faint hiss Bruce stepped inside and saw, as promised, a gargantuan pile of dirt.

“Well, this is it,” Clark said, turning back to Bruce. “The big project.”

The chamber had been completely restored. It looked nothing like the room Bruce had escorted Clark’s body into before, though he couldn’t be sure whether this new design deviated from the original. The intricately-carved walkway, which before had been crumbling and marred with deep, jagged gouges, had been repaired and now sloped elegantly downward at an angle that was slightly less steep. At the base of the chamber, Bruce could see that some topsoil had already been packed down, forming a bed of soil that would likely be over a foot thicker by the time the dirt in the centre was evenly distributed.

He suddenly wished he’d brought a bigger shovel.

“This is… it’s incredible,” he said. His eyes roamed over the far wall, which was now composed almost entirely of a vast glass tank. Lit from within by a light source of indeterminate origin, the tank looked to be filled with a translucent fluid and gave the room a soft, bluish glow. “Is this how it looked before…?”

Clark lifted a hand to scratch the back of his head, looking every bit the sheepish amateur carpenter. “More or less. It’s missing a few features, but this is the original design. Except for that,” he added, pointing at a small, square, hut-like alcove that seemed to have been built onto the wall on the right. “That’s where we’re keeping supplies for now. Kryptonians didn’t use tool sheds, but it’s easier to keep everything on hand than it is to keep going back for things.” 

Tool shed, shovel, buckets of soil… he was starting to get the picture. Bruce looked around the platform they were standing on, just inside the chamber, and found a side table that he rested his cowl and shovel on. He made his way slowly down the walkway and glanced downward. Nothing but dirt below.

“So when Barry said you were filling in a nursery, I take it he wasn’t referring to infants.”

Clark laughed, and Bruce suddenly realized that Clark wasn’t behind him on the walkway, but next to him in the air. “That was Barry’s word for it, not mine. No, it’s going to be a garden. Just with infant plants instead of… infant people.”

The thought seemed to amuse him, and Bruce couldn’t help but wonder precisely what joke he was missing. Suddenly, the air between them lit up with a vibrant blue light, and Barry came to a halt at the base of the walkway, sending a spray of dirt onto the pile sitting into the centre. “If I called it a greenhouse, would that sound better?”

“Is there a difference between a greenhouse and a nursery?” Clark asked.

“Only a minor one,” Bruce said, then stepped down onto the solid floor of the chamber. He hadn’t been down this far before, and it surprised him how large the tank felt now that he was closer to it. It loomed over him like a vast aquarium waiting to be filled with new inhabitants. Even Clark tipped his head back to view it as he descended silently to the floor. “So this is a garden? Or will be in the future?” 

“Eventually, yes. Nothing fancy, nothing too advanced, but… it felt like a waste of a chamber, leaving it here with junk in it.”

“Now you get to _branch out_ ,” Barry said, craning his neck back to see what Bruce had discovered.

“Growing flowers instead of monsters,” Bruce murmured. He tried to imagine the chamber as a field of wildflowers and rustling grasses, the tank as a lush terrarium. It would be a nightmare for anyone with seasonal allergies, but with robotic attendants, it could be breathtaking.

He smiled a little and looked at Clark, whose expression made it evident that his comment was unappreciated.

“Well, I’m eager to see what you plan to do with it. Do you have any plants or flowers in mind? Indoor trees? Dandelions and daisies?”

“Actually, I was thinking about something from my planet. Well, my other planet,” Clark said, and Bruce remembered a sickly green hue, the only other piece of Krypton he’d ever placed his hands on. He glanced away from the tank and inhaled while, as if on cue, the live lightning bolt that was Barry streaked its way toward the makeshift tool shed and back, planting a pitchfork in the dirt like an overly enthusiastic American Gothic.

“We’re gonna be the first people in thousands of years to grow Kryptonian crops,” he announced proudly. “Like _The Martian_ , but in reverse.”

“We’re not growing crops,” Clark clarified to Bruce. “No fruit, no vegetables. Just things I know won’t harm anyone if they happen to be misplaced.”

Bruce liked the sound of Kryptonian crops very little, and he liked the sound of Kryptonian crops being _misplaced_ even less. He could think of at least one person who would do far more damage than good with something as resilient as a Kryptonian weed, and he knew that she would stop at nothing if she caught wind of an entire chamber full of extraterrestrial plants.

He began to wander in the direction of the tool shed, pretending to admire the ground, the pile of dirt, the tank. “I didn’t realize you had access to anything Kryptonian beyond the ship.”

“Not much. This was a scouting ship at one point, so it was fitted with survival gear and food… pretty much everything an exploration crew would need to survive for a while if they found themselves stranded on the other side of the galaxy.”

“Like weapons.”

“Weapons that aren’t in my possession currently,” Clark acknowledged. He walked alongside Bruce, and together they made their way around the perimeter of the mountain of topsoil. “There were rations, too, like MREs. The food’s no good anymore, obviously, but among some of the environmental protection suits and weather devices there are these... ancient seeds of all different types. There’s an entire catalogue of them, including the kind of environments they would thrive in, and I’m still working on getting it translated so I can look through it on my own. I’m assuming there are seeds for what would have been common crops on Krypton, but I was thinking about planting a handful of different flowers and… shrubs, maybe. Something easy to take care of, something that looks nice.”

As they arrived at the tool shed, Bruce stepped inside and examined the interior. It was fairly small inside, large enough for maybe two, three people at most. There was a single surface that might pass as a work table with a set of worn garden gloves and a rusted spade, another shovel leaning against the wall, and a couple of shelves that were mostly bare, save for a few long and alien-looking instruments. The thought struck him as funny; Clark was the last person on earth who needed gardening gloves or hard tools with which to move dirt or rocks. They looked like items that might have been stolen from someone’s barn, and although he hadn’t set foot in the barn on the Kent property, he was certain that was more than likely the case. 

Though occupied with the question of what Clark could possibly need a set of gardening gloves for, Bruce could still sense Clark just behind him. He turned just as Clark rested his palms on the table and sighed. 

“You don’t like the idea.”

“Seriously?” Barry piped up from outside the small room. “You don’t like plants? Is it an allergy thing? Weed thing?” 

“It’s not that I don’t… approve of the concept of gardening,” Bruce said.

Clark gazed at him, then turned to face him properly.

“I know what you’re thinking. Kryptonian things are hard to kill, right? But I’m careful. I’ve been around a flower garden or two, Bruce. If I can trust you to take care of the things that I can’t… and I _can_ ,” he said pointedly, “then you can trust me to grow a few flowers in my own… space.”

Bruce nodded slowly. His mouth quirked up in the ghost of a smile, and he spent a moment wondering what Clark had meant to call the ship. His home? Was ‘space’ an intentional pun? Clark was a difficult person to predict. He was nothing at all like what Bruce had expected, and precisely as reckless as he’d hoped he wouldn’t be. “I thought you weren’t looking to bring anything Kryptonian back to life.”

“Yeah, but he grew up on a farm, right, Clark? You already know about taking care of plants,” Barry pointed out, still loitering outside the small shed. “Including how to weed out the bad ones. I mean, not that I think you’re gonna do something illegal, but with a little Kryptonian fertilizer, you could probably grow anything in here. Like, you could grow the strongest super-weeds known to man and trim them with your _eyes_. Now that’s convenience gardening.”

Bruce pressed his lips together and Clark shrugged helplessly. Kryptonian plants sounded catastrophic enough. Kryptonian _fertilizer_ could, in the wrong hands, give life to worse than mere super-weeds.

“Assuming you don’t grow… super-weeds… are you sure anything from Krypton will take root in an environment like this? Do plants grow in soil where you come from? Can they photosynthesize or do they require darkness? What about mineral and chemical content from the ground, the precipitation, the fertilizer?”

“I really don’t know anything about that yet,” Clark said. “Like I said, I’m in the process of taking inventory, and if there’s anything that seems potentially dangerous or harmful in any way, I’ll keep it locked away, somewhere safe and inaccessible. I’m not looking to win any awards for this, I just…”

He exhaled through his nose and turned toward the garden, leaning back against the table with his arms crossed over his chest. Through the tiny doorway, beyond Barry, Bruce couldn’t even see the top of the dirt pile. “I’m tired of trying to preserve pieces of Krypton when it just feels like it’s time to move on, and I’d rather fill the empty space with something I can stand to look at.”

It was easy to forget that while Bruce had visited the chamber once before, Clark had spent far more time in here. He’d likely seen the room before its destruction, and he’d been the first to discover what Luthor had created in the depths of that murky fluid. It must have been strange to think that something so terrible had happened just under his nose, in his own ship, the last remaining link to his home planet. It should have been a sanctuary for Clark, but it had been desecrated, looted, studied and studied and studied some more, and it had been taken away from him, ridding him of the only safe space he had left.

Until now.

Bruce hummed softly and leaned against the table too. “Well, I’m sure even the best farmers need a little assistance,” he said after a moment. “I, ah, don’t have much of a green thumb myself, but I’d be happy to move some dirt around if you’re eager to start planting.”

Clark gazed at him, the corners of his mouth beginning to turn up, and for a very brief moment in time, Bruce expected him to hold out a hand and shake on it. 

Barry still stood outside, seemingly unbothered by the solemn turn the conversation had taken only moments ago and the looks that Bruce and Clark were exchanging. “ _Nice_ ,” he said, spinning the pitchfork between his hands like a mischievous fly. “Someone better get a watering can. And _The Ultimate Guide to Throwing a Garden Party_. And some Josh Groban. Man, this is gonna be a _great_ night.”

It was only in the brief moments after, when Clark’s private smile was redirected to the Genesis Chamber at large and Bruce continued to watch him gaze fondly at this new and challenging project, he thought that he would have liked to shake Clark’s hand again.

Between Bruce, Barry, and Clark, the task of distributing the soil and packing it down was a strenuous process, filled with many quick breaks for snacks and water, and continued well into the night. It was honest work, aided in part by Barry’s speed and Bruce’s dogged determination; the pile of topsoil in the centre of the chamber slowly dwindled, and soon the walkway was strewn with pieces of Batsuit and Flashsuit that were not conducive to shoveling copious amounts of dirt; while Clark didn’t fatigue, Barry and Bruce certainly did, and in the early hours of the morning they stood back and surveyed the new landscape of the garden: lumpy in parts, littered with boot prints and crescent holes where a shovel was occasionally driven into the soil to rest, but still fairly even. With Bruce and Barry obviously exhausted, sweaty and suited up once more after having accomplished all that they could, Clark thanked them both and sent them on their way, then returned to the Genesis Chamber.

It was a work in progress, but it was a solid start on his project, and Clark was glad to have Bruce’s blessing, if hesitantly given. He was certain that Bruce would have some concerns about what Clark decided to grow, but he didn’t mind. It was a legitimate concern, given how most Kryptonian things had already been weaponized against the planet, but Clark would happily keep Bruce updated on his progress, and Bruce seemed like the sort of person who would appreciate the invitation to oversee and study an experiment of this sort. 

For now, however, it was time to relax. He could always refine the garden’s shape and structure in the morning. He had all the time in the world.

He stood in the centre of the chamber and inhaled. The scent of earth mingled with the unearthly interior atmosphere of the ship, and he himself was covered in it, shrouded in the nostalgic scent of a Kansas summer from his childhood. This garden, this apology for all that had been done to the Genesis Chamber, had the potential to be a truly remarkable project.

Now he only had to share it with someone.

Once Clark was clean and dressed in clothing that didn’t smell like freshly-tossed dirt, he called Lois on the phone Bruce had given him, sitting on a chair that the ship had manifested for him like a tired farmer proudly overlooking a hard day’s work. It was late even for Lois, who often pulled late nights while working projects and stories of her own, but she still picked up when he called… though, judging by the grogginess in her voice, he’d woken her from a dead sleep. He could hear her stifling a yawn against her sleeve from here even without the use of the phone.

“Is it all set up?” She asked, then yawned again.

“Mostly. Bruce helped me flatten out most of the soil that Barry brought in. I think I can start deciding which seeds to plant tomorrow.”

“Did you try Home Depot? Their nurseries are always shriveled up this time of year. Maybe you could pick up a few rescues and work on those.”

“Actually, I thought I might try planting something else,” Clark said. He pushed his toes into the dirt, nudging the soil aside to create a small depression. “Something from my world.”

“Oh,” Lois said, more pleasantly surprised than the disapproving tone Bruce had taken earlier. “Like a little patch of Krypton here on earth.”

“Do you think it’s a bad idea?”

Lois was quiet for a long moment. Clark could hear her chewing on her lip. “No,” she said. Her heartbeat remained steady, faint though it was through the receiver. He was almost certain she wasn’t lying. “I think it sounds nice, Clark.”

Clark smiled up at the tank. “I’d like to show you when it’s all done. When it starts growing, I mean. I think I can make something really beautiful here, Lo.”

“I think you deserve something beautiful,” Lois said softly.

They lapsed into silence. It wasn’t usually uncomfortable for them, but it was with noticeable hesitation that Lois asked, “Should I wait up for you tonight?”

“Uh… no, you should… you should get some sleep,” Clark said. He scratched at the back of his head, a persistent itch that he’d chalked up earlier in the evening to dirt in his hair. “I’ve got some more work to do before I can turn in.”

Lois made a quiet sound. Clark tried to hone in on the sound of her through the ambient noise of the ship and city around them, and to his disappointment, he only heard silence. Strange. He’d always been able to extend his hearing beyond the ship. Maybe it was his body’s way of telling him that it was time to turn in.

“You should get some rest too, Clark. Maybe you can show me some photos of the new building when you’re ready.”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Clark said. He kicked gently at the dirt and gazed up at the ceiling of the chamber, tracing his eyes over the hole that had been patched up in the days since his return. He had so much he wanted to say. _I miss you. I feel alone all the time. I’m sorry I can’t be the person you remember me being, but I’m trying._ “Sleep well, Lo.”

“Goodnight, Clark,” Lois said. The line went dead after a brief pause and Clark stretched out on his back, settling into the soft bed that he suspected the ship’s intelligence system was adjusting for him even now. 

He closed his eyes. It was easy to tune out the sounds of the city, and one by one, he shut out every voice, vehicle, and vibration that the city sent his way—all but the sound of the ship, which hummed gently as he turned over the day’s events in his mind. It still bothered him, Bruce’s reluctant blessing. He’d agreed to help, but disapproval had bled off of him when Clark had suggested growing Kryptonian plants.

_Growing flowers instead of monsters._

Clark turned onto his side and gazed at the wall. He wanted to think that Bruce was willing to let Clark’s interests take precedence over his own concerns. He hoped that Bruce would grow to embrace the idea, that the idea of Clark creating something beautiful would sink into his brain like ivy slowly taking the shape of a trellis.

He wasn’t sure yet why it was important for Bruce to approve, but Clark knew what he wanted. This would be the start of something truly splendid. 

A Genesis garden.

Beneath the earth, Clark stirred once more.

There was something cold and foreboding about the darkness that cradled him. He could feel it pressing in on him, a chill that sank into his bones and slowed his movement, his mind. It was a dream, that much he knew by now. The dream came nightly. He could weather this.

The noise arrived after an eternity; small insects, beetles, worms, the sounds of living things burrowing nearby. With his eyes wide open and the dark ahead, Clark imagined what their paths must have looked like. He listened to them tunnelling through the earth, chirring to one another, moving close and then far until the sound of their activity was drowned out once more by the roar of rain. Clark could hear it for overhead, and when he focused hard enough he could hear the sound of individual raindrops striking leaves, sliding along the surface of flower petals and grass blades, striking ground. The water soaked the earth and chilled his body, while above ground, voices slowly came into focus. He heard whispers, murmurs too low and indistinct for him to make out. A nearby funeral? Visitors at a grave?

Clark reached out again, like he always did, fingers stretched toward a sky just beyond his view—

and woke suddenly, back in the safety of the ship, shivering in sweat-drenched clothing. 

He stared at the ceiling for a moment, blinking away the last echoes of isolation that his dreams often left. The interior of the chamber he had adopted for a bedroom glowed a soft, pulsating blue, and while he had grown used to the cool colour of the light in the day, it was still jarring to wake up in this new environment. No brick, no stucco ceiling, no soft red digital display telling him to go back to sleep.

He pushed himself up and tugged off his shirt. Too groggy to replace it, he tossed it on the floor and settled back into the bed.

“Warm the lights,” he mumbled. His voice came out in a cracked whisper, and Clark realized that his throat was still dry.

“Sorry, your command is unclear.”

Clark swallowed and curled in on himself. Hearing the ship’s voice aloud helped, but the loneliness hadn’t yet crept past. At least in the apartment, Lois had been there for him to wrap himself around. “The lights. Dim them, make it… more like the sun. Warm.”

The ship was quiet for a moment, and then the lights began to change, shifting to a yellow-orange hue that reminded Clark of a salt lamp he’d once seen in the window of a novelty shop. Even the air around him began to heat up as the ship took his groggy order the best way it knew how. “Is this acceptable?”

“Yeah.” Clark closed his eyes and dragged his fingers through his hair. It was damp with sweat, which was not something he was used to. Lately his dreams had left him with a distinctly unsettled feeling, and he was glad to be in conscious control of his own movements in the disorienting moments after, certain that he was safe from the things that haunted him in his dreams.

He didn’t want to call them memories. He didn’t know if that would be accurate, or if it would even be true, and he certainly didn’t want to think that his mind was slowly beginning to fill in the blanks about his time underground. There was nothing good for him to learn about that time. There was nothing that could erase it.

After a few moments, he settled back into his bed, still rubbing at his scalp. The motion was soothing, familiar. Mom had done it to him as a child, and as he found himself recalling how much the slow, rhythmic motion had calmed him when he was young and so easily overwhelmed by the world, he continued to stroke his hair in the hopes that maybe this time he wouldn’t dream at all. Maybe the sensory memory would pull him into a dreamless slumber, and maybe he wouldn’t feel so alone. 

He began to drift off, and eventually his hand slowed and stilled. Sleep was close, he knew, and so was the dream. The blades of grass whispered between his fingers and tickled his palm, and he could feel the warmth of the sun on the backs of his knuckles as his hand pushed through the sod—

Clark blinked his eyes open, hand going still at the back of his skull as he pulled himself from the hazy edge of sleep. Hair. It was hair between his fingers, perfectly normal human hair, and nothing more—only when he pulled his hand away, some of his hair went with it.

“Wh...?” He glanced at his hand, then at the too-bright ceiling, his mouth thick with sleep, his throat dry once more. “What is...?”

“It appears you have removed some of your hair,” the ship said smoothly.

Clark stared up at the ceiling. He wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t still dreaming? “Why?”

“Why is unclear. Why _have_ you removed some of your hair?”

He squeezed his fingers into a fist. This was definitely a dream. The ship was a smartass, but it wasn’t a sadist.

“Why?” he asked again, quieter this time, a question posed to his mind rather than the ship. Most people dreamed about losing teeth, or being late for an important event. He dreamt about being buried alive. Would it kill him to come up with something uplifting for once?

“Among healthy young Kryptonians, hair loss is abnormal,” the ship replied. “For Kryptonians whose genetic material has been compromised—”

“Yes, I get it,” Clark grumbled, his patience dulled by his desire to sink back into oblivion. He recalled the ship explaining the Kryptonian growth codex, the registry of citizens that General Zod had tried so hard to extract from his genetic code. The ship had never told him in so many words that his genetic code was compromised, but he was a Kryptonian who, despite having pure genetics from two parents, had been altered nonetheless “The codex makes me abnormal. But this”—he held out his hand and allowed the tuft to float from his fingers and settle on the floor—“isn’t normal.”

There was an uncomfortably long silence from the ship as Clark gazed down at the hair on the floor, then pushed himself upright and sat on the bed, letting his sheets pool around his waist. He ran his fingers through his hair again. There was no pain in his scalp, no pulling sensation from his fingers sliding through, and yet more strands of his hair clung to his fingers when he held his hand in front of his face. 

“What are you trying to tell me?” he asked his hair.

“I have insufficient data to answer your query,” the ship replied.

Clark swallowed and watched the strands slip between his fingers. When he reached up again, searching for the spot where he’d pulled the hair free, he could feel a tiny patch of smooth skin. More notably, he could feel a small lump beneath the bare skin, one that didn’t feel particularly similar to the rest of the small bumps he was used to feeling on his skull, and for the first time Clark felt… nervous. Dream or no dream, health problems had never been an issue for him, and until now, following his reanimation by the Mother Box, he’d been entirely asymptomatic.

He swallowed and ran his fingers through his hair again. His hand came back clean this time, but he could still feel the small bump beneath his fingertips.

All he needed to do was go back to sleep. That was how dreams worked, after all. In the morning he would wake up sweating through his sheets, and he would return to the garden and continue his work and let it distract him from the lingering sense of unease.

He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes.

In the morning he would wake up, and everything would be fine.

Superman had not made a public appearance in days.

It was both a relief and a concern for Bruce. He had told Clark that it was okay to take time to rest and to prepare himself for the inevitable flurry of paparazzi and headlines and unwanted attention that would eventually lead reporters and Superman chasers to the front door of the ship in Metropolis, but it was strange to know that he was still out there, even while newspapers and news channels struggled to find unaired footage and photographs and stories of being saved (or ignored) to broadcast while Superman kept to himself. Bruce found a strange comfort in seeing Clark on television and online now, and he was well aware that it was a feeling that he had not felt in quite some time; before, every media had been filled with eulogies and thinkpieces and opinions from all parts of the approval spectrum. Now people simply wondered where Superman went, and it was a secret that Bruce was happy to keep. 

The National Enquirer suggested that he’d perished in a space mission, returned to his home planet, and renounced the band of metahumans known globally as the Justice League to establish Earth as his primary base of operations to eventually subjugate and destroy mankind. It was a single issue, and Bruce made sure to buy a copy to give Clark when he saw him next.

It did not escape him that Clark was, with the exception of common indoor plants, renovations to the manor, and the minor task of dealing with the garbage that had washed up in the harbour—an event that Arthur, who definitely had his own communication device with which to contact Bruce about such things, still had to answer for—the only thing that currently occupied his mind.

He thought about calling Clark. He considered texting him websites with easy-to-grow flowers, lilies and succulents and cacti and things that needed little sunlight, little water, little attention at all. Surely these would be more desirable things to have in a garden than Kryptonian flora, whose effects on earth would be unknown and unpredictable at best. He thought about asking if Clark wanted help planting seeds, and he stood in his office during the day and held the phone in his pocket and waited for Clark to reach out to him first, to let Bruce know that his shovel was still there, to tell him that a second pair of gloves would be a welcome addition, to suggest a few cold bottles of water in case they needed to keep digging.

He’d tried his best to show Clark that he was supportive. Friendly.

Sorry.

Interested.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket.

 _Silver bells and cockle shells?_ he sent and, finding himself unable to come up with anything more clever than that, continued to think of the refrain for the next three hours, until at last the phone buzzed and the screen displayed a message not from Clark, but Barry, exclaiming loudly in the group chat:

_SEWING PARTY IN THE PARK_

_SOWING_

_KNOWLEDGE IS POWER_

Bruce was not entirely sure what message Barry was attempting to convey, but he felt better knowing that at least someone had been in contact with Clark. Even if Bruce was not Clark’s first choice when it came to reaching out, Bruce was glad that he was beginning to warm up to the other members of the group. Most of what Bruce knew about Clark came second-hand—some from Lois, some from Martha, and some from the articles he’d written for the Planet—but from the few brief conversations they’d shared in the past weeks, he felt confident that Clark was a very private person, and that however slow the process, he would be able to convince Clark that he was someone worth putting faith in.

Clark’s name was the next to appear: _You’re all invited. :)_

It was the first time Bruce had ever seen Clark make a face out of text. He felt confident that his plan was already working.

Horticulture was not one of Bruce’s primary interests, but learning was.

Clark had been right about the ship’s database of on-board specimens; the storage unit that contained a variety of tools that would be useful in planting crops on foreign planets also contained a vast number and variety of seeds in all shapes and sizes, and the ship’s AI had information on each and every specimen that they pulled out. Bruce, Clark, Barry, and now Victor had the opportunity to dig into Kryptonian culture, and for hours they remained in the ship, sifting through dozens of species of flora to find appropriate seeds for a first-time gardener to plant: small, strange capsules with subtle nubs, rice grain-sized polygons that pulsed gently with warmth, flat seeds with rows of spines, unusually long seeds that could have been mistaken for writing utensils, and more. 

Luckily, the ship was helpful in describing the plants and their uses, their cultural relevance, and as many other details as they could think to ask: the thin seed was blackbrush, a naturally-occurring plant with a thick, ovular head that sprouted soft bristles on the side nearest to its light source; a seed with shallow grooves would sprout into a selas, a purplish pod-shaped lump that sat lopsided on the ground for months on end before first belching a cloud of sweet-smelling pollen, then promptly decaying; several of the seeds in Clark’s possession were species of duroper, hardy plants from a nearby tidal locked planet with thick, broad leaves and long roots that anchored them in the soil, making them ideal specimens for harsher environments. 

And the environment was another important detail that needed to be addressed. Krypton itself had never become tidal locked, Bruce learned over the course of the evening, but much of Krypton’s plant life had withered and died over generations as the planet had been strip-mined and its resources depleted. There were parts of the surface that were still lush with vegetation up until Krypton’s demise, grasses and bushes and shrubs and brilliant flowers that had been genetically modified, much like the rest of the planet’s population.

Bruce was fascinated. They all were. Barry fiddled with a handful of seeds while Victor sat perfectly still and seemed to absorb the information directly into his system. Clark inspected every specimen with great attentiveness, and it was hard not to find his enthusiasm infectious. Bruce was learning Krypton’s history and culture, and Clark was learning with him, openly sharing with them his knowledge, his experience with his home planet.

Partway through a lecture from the ship, Bruce held a hand out to Clark, and Clark gently placed the seed he’d been examining into Bruce’s palm.

“Your joke earlier was a good one,” Clark said quietly.

“It wasn’t a joke,” Bruce murmured back. “It was a _nursery_ rhyme.”

Clark contemplated that for a moment, gazing up at the ship’s enlarged projection of the seed Bruce now held in his palm, then laughed aloud.

“I liked the look of this,” Victor said. He held a seed in his hand; his palm had raised to become a small Petri dish-like structure, and the orange light on his forehead was currently projecting a flickering image of a shrub over the Kryptonian ship’s three-dimensional pseudo-metal liquid display. “The ship said it would flourish in most environments with minimal precipitation. You can’t go wrong with something that doesn’t need water more than once every few weeks.”

It was a few hours later, and they had begun to sow some of the seeds. A new layer of topsoil had been added, left loose for easy planting, and with the ship’s help was tilled into a whimsical pattern of rows that were neither perfectly straight nor evenly spaced. The chamber was not perfectly symmetrical to begin with, and it was important to leave paths that would allow one to navigate the entirety of the garden with ease. The tool shed against the wall offset many of the rows, and another depression on the opposite side—“What? I can’t put a pond in, too?” Clark asked, adjusting the baseball cap he’d donned for the evening—forced them to get creative with their design. Many of the plants required varying distances between seedlings, and so each small depression had to be measured out carefully. Entropy with a purpose.

“You know, there’s still the problem of actually watering these guys regularly,” Barry pointed out. He was closer to the pond-to-be, and he had a handful of smooth, speckled pods that reminded Bruce of river stones. “If you’re away all the time and you live in Kansas and need someone to keep an eye on the nursery—”

“I’ll be around to water the garden, don’t worry,” Clark said, amused. “You’re welcome to visit whenever you’re in the area.”

“Totally!” Barry said, voice high pitched enough to suggest that he’d been hoping to be of more use. “Got it. Yeah, well, of course you’ll always be around, but if you’re ever not I can probably help.” He glanced around, face scrunching up in thought. “How are you gonna ensure that every section gets precisely the amount of water that it needs, anyway? Watering robots? A fire hose? Sprinkler system?”

“All of the above,” Clark said, then tipped his head back and addressed the room at large. “Initiate mist irrigation.”

At Clark’s command a fine mist began to filter into the air from an unspecified source, filling the chamber so quickly that Bruce couldn’t even tell where it had come from. He could feel it on his face, cool and fine. No smell, no colour, and no taste. It was a perfectly normal mist—at least, in his section of the garden. Barry stood in a section with a mist so fine that Bruce wasn’t even sure there was any. 

Clark, on the other hand, was barely visible through the cloud near the tool shed.

“The ship can control how much water each section gets, and it doesn’t have to be in the form of mist. Ship, a little rain?”

“Switching precipitation to: rain,” the ship announced, and Bruce found himself ducking beneath his arm as a sudden shower erupted and began to soak his clothing.

“Cool,” Victor said. The metal of his body seemed to shimmer in the rain, and Barry, too, made a panicked sound and pulled his shirt up over his head.

“Okay, that’s enough, that’s enough,” Clark said quickly, waving his hand in the air. His clothing was entirely soaked through after the deluge in his corner; the rain had darkened his shoulders and chest, and a grin split his face as he blinked water droplets out of his eyelashes and squinted upward. Now Bruce knew why he’d worn a hat. “Cease irrigation cycle.”

“Irrigation cycle interrupted,” the ship announced. Water rolled down Clark’s face, and when he caught sight of Bruce he wiped his face with the back of his arm and lifted himself into the air and away from the puddles that had already begun to form.

“That’s impressive,” Bruce said, trying to ignore the way Clark’s t-shirt clung to his shoulders. “I’ll be honest, I’m surprised the ship didn’t suggest creating a hydroponic system with the amniotic fluid.”

“Hydroponic system?”

“It’s a form of hydroculture that uses nutrient delivery systems instead of regular soil, the way traditional farming does,” Victor explained, stepping carefully over rows until he reached the centre of the garden. “It would probably make sense that the Kryptonians used a similar system due to its increased efficiency, and… with them being an advanced race and all.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of aquaponics,” Barry said, nodding along enthusiastically. “They use fish excrement to help fertilize the crops. Why didn’t you do that instead of filling up this whole place with dirt? I mean, not that it was hard, but I bet you could’ve asked Arthur to convince some of his friends to help you out.”

Clark blinked at them. “I… guess I’m just old-fashioned,” he said after a moment. He must not have been expecting the question. “My father was a traditional farmer, and my mother had flowerbeds. Seeds and dirt were all they had, so I suppose soil is what I’m most comfortable with.” He paused, then smiled sheepishly, water still dripping from his nose. “But I did put in a drainage layer underneath all of this, so at least the precipitation that trickles down through will be filtered and reintroduced into the cycle. No waste or stagnant pools of… anything.”

Any questions Bruce may have had about the structure of the garden fell away at Clark’s confession; he remembered the pile of dirt next to Clark’s empty grave in the early summer sun, open and waiting for a coffin that would never return, and he remembered how it had reminded him then of the pile of dirt that had lain next to the grave as a black-clad group of people slowly made their way out of the cemetery and back up the winding path that led to the Kent house. The grave site was proof that Clark Kent had died, that Superman could be defeated, but he’d proven that to be wrong. Though a gravestone still bore his name, Clark Kent had never died. He’d only been halted temporarily, buried deep beneath the ground where no harm could come to him. Quiescent. Like a seed.

He forced himself back to the present. Barry and Victor had moved further away and were still engaged in a discussion about hydroponics, though Bruce had missed too much of the conversation to know precisely what was being debated. Clark, still in his soaked clothing, didn’t appear to have noticed Bruce’s momentary absence from the conversation; he stood facing away from Bruce, hands on his hips, and after a moment he adjusted his cap and turned around and looked at Bruce with an expression that suggested he hadn’t realized he was being watched.

“What do you think?” he asked, approaching Bruce gingerly so as to not disturb the wet soil. “Still a terrible idea?”

“I don’t think I ever said it was a terrible idea.”

“I know,” Clark said, offering Bruce a small, playful smile. “I really appreciate all of your help today. I know this isn’t as pressing as keeping criminals off the streets, but… it means a lot to me that you did this.” 

“Well, it’s still an alien invasion, if only on a… very small scale,” Bruce said solemnly, and Clark lowered his head and laughed, glancing at him again when Bruce added, “but it’s a nice change of pace.”

“It’s a nice change of pace,” Clark agreed. He held Bruce’s gaze for a moment, long enough for Bruce to catch the shimmer of a raindrop sliding down his forehead from underneath the cap, then looked back out over the garden with a satisfied sigh as, for a few peaceful seconds, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and silently appreciated the view.

It was just after three when at last Barry excused himself for the evening, citing ‘seed fatigue’ and ‘biology lab effect’ (“You know, like when you’re really into the lab and you love learning about the material but the teacher is just soooo boring that you’re ready for a full night’s sleep after like, two hours? Sorry, scout ship.”) as the primary reasons for his departure. Victor, too, seemed happy to leave shortly after, and once he made his way through the chamber’s doorway and disappeared out of sight, Bruce found himself alone with Clark once again in the quiet of the garden.

“I’d say that was a pretty successful night,” Clark said as he watched Bruce pulling on various pieces of his suit in preparation for the trip back across the bay. “All that’s left to do is to fill the pond and let everything… take root.”

“Just make sure you keep this room locked up tight if you’re not around,” Bruce reminded him. “This ship needs to be like a fortress at all times. Even if you have the seeds themselves hidden away, you need to ensure that nobody will be able to access this room unless you give the command.” He didn’t wish to sour Clark’s good mood at the end of such a productive evening, but his concerns about the proximity of such rare and unpredictable alien flora to certain individuals in Gotham City were omnipresent, and he would have been doing Clark a disservice if he did not warn him eventually.

Clark nodded and scratched at one shoulder. “I’ll keep that in mind. If I need any extra security, I’ve got the robots, too, but, uh…” He took a breath and paused. “I haven’t been out much recently since I’ve been back. A few trips out here and there. I’ve been thinking about getting back out, so… if you happen to see the cape… you know.” 

Bruce finished pulling on a boot. He’d suspected that Clark hadn’t been going far. “Mmhm. I think most people have assumed that you’re flying under the radar intentionally. A few seem to think the thing in the park was a hoax, but… for most people, it’s enough to know that you’re out here listening.” 

He cursed himself for not remembering his copy of the Enquirer issue, then wet his lips and asked, “What happened to Lois?”

The question seemed to catch Clark off-guard. He took a breath and glanced away, suggesting with every bit of body language that Bruce could read that he did not want to have this conversation. “It’s not your business. You know that.”

“I know,” Bruce said.

Clark narrowed his eyes briefly, then looked up at the ceiling, as though searching the empty space of the chamber for an answer to Bruce’s question. “It’s… uh.” He blew out a puff of air. “It’s just not working right now, I guess. We’re still trying to adjust to everything that’s happened, and I...”

Bruce’s expression softened. It was obvious that some distance had grown between Clark and Lois. Time would have created a rift between them on its own, had Clark simply been absent for a year, but it wasn’t as though he’d simply packed his things and disappeared. He understood, to a degree. Things had changed between himself and Clark too, though he’d taken great effort to ensure that Clark had felt more kindly toward him upon his return. Now, he found it difficult to resist placing his palm on Clark’s shoulder just to be sure that he was really there. 

“Are you okay?”

Clark looked down at the ground and grimaced. Bruce pulled on one gauntlet in silence, then another.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said quietly, “and if it’s okay with you, I’m not going to talk about it right now.”

Bruce gazed at him. In the brief time that he’d known Clark, in the few private conversations they’d had that had taken a turn beyond superficial discussion and edged into personal territory, he’d never felt Clark withdraw so quickly.

“You went through something that very few people in this world have,” he said, lowering his voice to match Clark’s. “But you don’t need to feel like you’re alone in this, Clark. If you need something, all you need to do is ask.”

Clark nodded. He was pointedly avoiding eye contact now, and although Bruce waited for him to respond, it appeared as if the conversation had come to an end.

Bruce lifted the cowl and settled it over his head. This was a boundary he couldn’t yet push, but he’d return to it. Maybe one day Clark would open up to him, and Bruce would see his personality unfold like a flower turning to the sun.

“Have a good night, Clark,” he said, and was already out the door when behind him, Clark said:

“Goodnight, Bruce.”

It was a relief when Bruce finally departed the ship. Clark hadn’t expected him to make any excuses to stick around, and he’d expected Bruce to ask about his personal life even less. He had learned the hard way that Bruce was not someone to be underestimated, or someone whose actions could easily be predicted, and this time was no different—but no matter how much he wanted to dwell on it, to let an old memories bubble up and morph into righteous indignation, his conversation with Bruce was not one that he had time to dissect right now.

Bruce was gone, but Clark was still not alone on the ship.

“Thanks for sticking around,” he called out from the entrance to the garden. He could hear metallic footfalls further down the hallway, and after a moment Victor came into view, followed shortly by a levitating ‘bot that accompanied them both to a smaller chamber toward the eastern side of the ship. It was a med bay, or perhaps had been one long ago, but if any tools had remained after the Black Zero event and the subsequent claiming of his ship by the government, they were now long gone.

“I figured this had to be something important if you didn’t want Bruce to know,” Victor said as they walked. “Usually he’s the first one anybody calls.”

“If I thought that he could give me answers, I would have contacted him first,” Clark said. He sat on a low examination table and watched the robot hovering behind Victor like a faithful butler, but Victor paid him no mind. whose cybernetic eye flicked up and down, taking in Clark’s appearance. 

“I’m just making sure Bruce is gone,” he said. The bright pupil of his cybernetic eye flickered nervously over Clark, but his gaze was distant, like he was watching Clark and someone else at the same time. “He’s on his way into the city now, so… tell me what I’m looking at.”

Clark removed his hat. Another clump of hair had fallen away earlier in the afternoon, and in one of the small bald patches he’d found a tiny, hard protrusion. He’d covered himself with an old Chiefs baseball cap to hide the evidence, but neither Bruce nor Barry had commented on his appearance, and he’d been vigilant throughout the evening, watching for any hint of hair that might have fallen in the garden. Now Clark sat with his hands folded in his lap, gazing down at his hat with no small amount of self-consciousness as Victor cautiously inspected the top of his head.

“That’s strange,” Victor said. “And the ship doesn’t have any explanation for it?”

“Just that my DNA is corrupted,” Clark said. “Before my father sent me away from Krypton, he stole something called a codex and… somehow infused my body with the information it held.”

“What information was that?”

“The genetic blueprints for every single person on Krypton. Zod made some efforts to extract it, hoping to rebuild Krypton using the information in my DNA, but… obviously that didn’t happen,” Clark said grimly.

Victor, who now looked appropriately horrified by this information, laughed in disbelief, then continued to inspect Clark’s scalp. At some point, the indicator light on his forehead had shifted from blue to orange, which Clark now understood to mean that he was communicating with something. “Yeah, I guess not. And we don’t have access to any more information from Krypton, do we?”

Clark shrugged helplessly. “We did at one point. My father’s consciousness was uploaded to this ship back when I first discovered it. It was on a ship command key that I’d had for as long as I remembered, but the key got sucked into the Phantom Zone when the ships…” 

He gestured vaguely. Victor made a faint ‘uh huh’ sound behind him, then stepped around to examine Clark from the front.

“It would be useful to have an updated intelligence. This thing’s gotta be over twenty thousand years old. Its AI is… I mean, it feels archaic. The Mother Boxes are _old_ old, but I can feel things through them that this ship’s systems wouldn’t even begin to comprehend without a pretty major update.”

“My father’s AI was up-to-date, but Zod undid all of that, too,” Clark said sourly. “I wish I’d been able to stop him sooner. My father would have been able to help.”

Victor hummed. Clark could feel his fingers combing slowly through his hair, though whatever Victor was searching for, he couldn’t be certain. “Maybe I can access it. If it’s just an AI blocked by some sort of firewall, I might be able to bypass it. Maybe if we gain access to some kind of intelligence that could tell us about the ship or—”

“That won’t work. Zod deleted every single bit of my father that I’d managed to upload,” Clark said wistfully. “There’s nothing left of him. The data’s irretrievable. I tried everything I could to get it back, but even being the last member of my species doesn’t give me the power to undo what he did.”

He didn’t have to look up to feel the sympathetic expression that Victor was making, and he could feel his shoulders sag with defeat.

“Sometimes I wish I could just... talk to him,” Clark said quietly. He could feel another itch near his shoulder, a spot where the fabric was still a little damp from the earlier rain. “I feel like he’d know what to do. About everything.”

Victor gazed down at him for a moment, then nodded at Clark’s shoulder. “Mind if I take a look?”

“Sure.”

Clark bowed his head as Victor moved around the table and stood behind him again; the metal of his fingers was surprisingly warm as Victor pulled back the collar of Clark’s shirt and began to inspect the spot that he’d scratched at, but more surprising than the temperature of Victor’s hand on his back was the way he brushed a finger over Clark’s shoulder and said “Oh, shit.”

It was not the boost of confidence that Clark had hoped for. Immediately he felt an icy surge of uncertainty, and he turned to Victor with a sharp look. “What does that mean?”

“It means I, um. I didn’t mean to do this, it just… does this usually happen to your skin?”

Victor held his hand in front of Clark, and Clark could see a small, brittle-looking flake in his palm. It didn’t look like flesh, nor was it the same shape of the small protrusion that Clark had found on his head; it was darker than Clark’s natural skin tone, so thin that it was almost translucent, and when Clark took it between his thumb and forefinger and lifted it for a better look, a small piece broke from the edge and disappeared out of sight.

He thought about asking the ship whether this was a recognizable symptom of any particular Kryptonian ailment, but he was sure he knew what the answer would be.

“No, I’ve never… I’ve never seen this before,” Clark said, turning the piece over to examine it in the light. One side was smooth-looking, with no marks or colours or spots to be seen, but one side held a faint texture—rough, like stone, or—

“It kind of looks like... tree bark,” Victor said, peeling Clark’s damp shirt aside again to more closely examine his shoulder. “But why would there be tree bark on...” 

Clark could see the orange light from Victor’s forehead reflecting off the surface of the robot that was still drifting around the room; he couldn’t see a reflection of Victor’s face, but he could feel the persistent itch in his shoulder again, and suddenly there was a warmth on his back, like the slow trickle of a raindrop.

“Do you see anything?” Clark asked. He could feel the familiar cold dread rising in the pit of his stomach, only in this dream he could not crawl his way upward to safety. “Victor?”

“We’ve gotta—”

“We cannot—”

“—tell Bruce,” Victor finished, then narrowed his eyes at Clark. “Wait, why not? You don’t think this is the kind of thing that we should bring up to him after all the work he put in to get you here?”

Clark lifted a hand to run his fingers through his hair and stopped short, remembering the way the clumps had come out earlier in the day. He curled his hand into a frustrated fist and let it fall to his side. The more hair he pulled out, the more tiny protrusions would find their way through his scalp, and he wasn’t yet prepared to deal with what came after.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell him yet. If he knows there’s something strange happening to me that seems related in any way to what I’m doing—”

“Then he’ll try to find a way to fix it. That’s what he does. He’s Batman.”

“ _Batman_ has had a rocky history with most Kryptonian things,” Clark said, remembering a haze of green, nausea and weakness made tangible. Poison, he’d thought. Lois had told him the difference later, and while he was thankful that the rest of that material was safely stored away, the fact remained that the material had been safely stored away by Bruce. “He doesn’t fully trust me with this garden yet, and I know for a fact he won’t trust me at all once he finds out about this.”

 _This_ was, as the ship had initially suggested, an issue of corruption. The very concept had prompted a hollow laugh from Clark, who had grown used to the idea of being a macrocosm of sorts, but had certainly not grown used to the idea that one day the pieces of his DNA that were not his own would begin to manifest.

“Man, all he does is trust you,” Victor said. “The whole time you were gone, when he found out about the Mother Boxes and what they were capable of, he’d just been cooking up that plan to bring you back. He bought your _house_ back. We can probably say he trusts you at least a little bit.”

Victor paced around the table. Clark could still see the dark substance on his fingers that had leaked from his shoulder where the rough patch of skin had flaked away. It had no recognizable scent, and it looked nothing like blood, which meant that Clark couldn’t possibly have scratched hard enough to break skin and cause a bleed.

“Maybe he does. Maybe he trusts that what I’m doing in the ship isn’t dangerous, but if I tell him that something is going on with me that seems even the least bit relevant to this garden, he’s going to blame it on the Kryptonian seeds and he’s going to shut it down, and I… I want this,” he said plaintively. “I want this garden, Victor. I want to keep doing what I want on my terms, and I want to know that if I put my foot down and tell him I’m doing things my way, he won’t take it as a threat.”

“Why would he take it as a threat?”

“Because I’m stronger than he is, and it scares him,” Clark said quietly. “Did he ever tell you that? That before his plan to bring me back, he was the one trying to find a way to bring me down?”

Victor’s pacing stopped, and he looked at Clark with a frown. “He didn’t mention that part.”

Clark shook his head and pushed himself off of the table, rolling his shoulder cautiously as he stood to his feet. It didn’t hurt to move, but there was a gentle pull in the spot where the skin had flaked off. “I wouldn’t expect him to. I’m not angry about what he did, and he’s been… kind to me, ever since I’ve been back.”

It was as close to the truth as Clark could come. He wasn’t angry at Bruce, and he hadn’t expected Bruce to tell anyone what had happened, and Bruce had been… _kind_ wasn’t a strong enough word. But he still had a few things that he wished to speak to Bruce about, and he knew that certain subjects would not be approached lightheartedly. Like the subject of Lois, or how closely and easily Bruce had come to putting a stake through his heart.

“So maybe he’s trying to make things right. Listen, I don’t know what happened between you guys before. All I know is that he still had faith that you’d do the right thing, even if you hated him for bringing you back. And I’m sure he’d understand that what’s happening to you isn’t right and he’d try to help.”

“He thought I’d hate him?” Clark asked. 

Victor took a seat on the table, resting his arms on his elbows as he watched Clark stroll aimlessly around the room. “Despite whatever happened between you two before we got involved, it looks like he’s still making an effort here. And no matter how badly you wanna let him keep thinking things are okay, you can’t protect him by not telling him the truth. It’s only gonna make things worse when he finds out.”

Clark leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.

He wanted to tell Bruce. He also wanted to blame Bruce. He wanted to blame his father, and Zod, and Lex Luthor, and Victor, and the ship, and the Mother Boxes, and everyone and everything else who had allowed this to happen. Clark’s entire life had been a series of choices that he had had no control over: the codex, the appearance of his powers, the mutated and deformed Zod, the use of the Mother Box and the Genesis Chamber in jolting him out of an endless darkness and back into…

this.

“I can’t tell him now,” he said softly. “Not until I know how bad this is going to get. So I need you to tell me that he won’t find out from you.”

Victor continued to gaze at him from atop the table, then looked down at the fluid that still covered his fingers.

“It’s not a secret I wanna keep, but… if things get worse, if something bad happens… I’m gonna have to go to him. We can’t deal with this alone.”

Clark could live with that. He could live with ‘if’s. He’d lived with them his entire life. If people find out about you, they may fear you. If you don’t find a way to stop Zod, or Luthor, or Batman, they may kill you. 

He’d also dealt with things alone for most of his life, and so far, it had proven to be the single most efficient way to ensure that people he cared about did not get dragged into his mistakes and did not suffer the consequences of his actions simply by virtue of being close to him.

“Hey, Clark? We’ll find a way to deal with this,” Victor said softly, sincerely. “I promise.”

Clark wanted so very, very badly to think that he was right.

“Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I hope you understand how perturbing I find this new hobby of yours to be.”

The troubled one was Alfred, as was most often the case, and the newest hobby of Bruce’s that he found perturbing today was not a hobby at all, but an admission: he’d quietly removed—or perhaps had technically stolen—a handful of seeds from the scout ship. Small ones, easily pocketable without close supervision. He’d obtained seeds in the shape of pockmarked ellipsoids with vibrant colours and burrs with hooked points that stuck painlessly to his skin, seeds the shape of rice grains with delicate wings and flattened seeds with a fine ring of hair; mostly ones that he had been trusted to plant in the section of the garden he had been assigned to, because after all, it was often difficult to accurately measure fractions of inches with the naked eye, and sometimes a row ended up a seed or two short.

He had taken them primarily because he was certain that Clark wouldn’t miss them, and secondarily because he was certain that they would cause him no harm if he wished to examine them in detail.

“They were given to me, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.” Bruce said. He was currently bent over a table, distracted from conversation by a specimen that would eventually become a barbed bliyeaf, a horrifying hydra of a weed that would grow into a thick cluster of quills which grew quickly and exponentially if damaged. The only way to disarm it, if a plant could be described in such a way, was to grip it by the spines and remove it entirely from the soil. A great amount of temporary pain would ensure long-term safety and prevent the bliyeaf from reproducing.

Bruce was used to great amounts of temporary pain, and found this seed particularly fascinating. Not enough to grow, but at least enough to study.

He pushed his chair away from the microscope to give Alfred space and nodded at the lens. Alfred hummed disapprovingly and looked anyway, and Bruce turned to the table behind him, where each seed sat individually contained and labeled from his memory of the scout ship’s evening of lectures (which was to say, potentially labeled incorrectly).

“What do you think?”

“I think they look remarkably…”

“Alien?”

“I was going to say familiar.” Alfred straightened up and looked over Bruce’s collection. He had nine seeds in total, which meant he had nine things for Alfred to disapprove loudly of, and Alfred wore the very expression that Bruce had come to learn would precede a lecture of his own. “Are you thinking about planting a garden of your own, or would you rather I tell Master Kent, should he inquire, that these were acquired by accident?”

“He won’t ask. He’s not going to find out.”

Alfred pressed his lips together, then rounded the table where he’d placed a plate of thematically-relevant fruits for Bruce to see. “You know, it would be easier to befriend someone if you weren’t constantly attempting to undermine them.”

“You think helping him plant his garden full of Kryptonian specimens is undermining him? You think bringing him back was undermining him?”

“I think you’re trying to find any excuse that you can not to trust him.” Alfred took a seat in Bruce’s chair near the computer and gave a pointed look at one of the monitors, which displayed a seed that Bruce had already dissected layer by layer. “I think that you believe that your relationship with Superman and Clark Kent is all about what you think is the right thing to do. Tell me, what would you find the most frightening about a basket of Kryptonian flowers, aside from their otherworldly origins?”

“The fact that people like Poison Ivy, Lex Luthor, Amanda Waller, and likely a few thousand other people would take this information and these samples and exploit them. Jesus, Alfred, look at what happened in that ship. You think Ivy wouldn’t find a way into that ship and do god knows what with some of those crops?”

“They’re crops,” Alfred said mildly.

“It never stopped her before,” Bruce replied. “If Lex Luthor could make a creature strong enough to take down Superman with a corpse and his own blood, what could someone like Ivy do with an armada of indestructible plants?”

Alfred hummed again and nodded in thought. He was watching Bruce with a calm, thoughtful expression, which was infinitely more infuriating than if he’d simply disagreed with him.

“So are you going to stop him?”

“Who?”

“Clark. Are you going to tell him it’s out of the question that he allow this garden to grow? Or perhaps continue to borrow from him until he has no seeds left to plant?”

Bruce had not been able to answer that question, even for himself. The seeds had been planted. There was a possibility that he could sabotage the garden, if he felt it dire to do so, but the fact was that Clark had taken every measure to ensure that the seeds they had planted would grow into adult plants that were, as far as the ship could predict, entirely safe for humans to be around and posed no threat to the earth's many ecosystems. That was _if_ the seeds took root and grew. It was possible that they had lain dormant for so long that no growth would occur, and it was also possible that even with the ship’s aid, Clark would prove so unsuccessful a gardener that nothing would grow regardless of the seeds’ potential. 

He had many options at his fingertips, and every single one felt like the wrong choice to make.

He didn’t want to see Clark fail. He didn’t want to see Clark wasting his life on silly hobbies like gardening when there was so much work to be done, but he also didn’t want Clark to feel as though he owed the world Superman’s talents and abilities simply because he existed. There were many things that he didn’t want for Clark, and many more that he did: happiness, of course, and another chance at living in a world that appreciated him, respected him, would allow him to do the things that he wanted.

And here he was, making every attempt to convince Clark, who seemed to be living a solitary life in his ship, who had been electrocuted back into consciousness by a mechanism that may have been scientific or magical or both, who already had every reason not to listen to Bruce, that what he wanted was not allowed. He expected Clark to work with him, to respect him, to trust him, and it did not escape Bruce that he was actively sabotaging his own efforts.

He had promised Martha that he would watch out for her son. He had promised Lois that no matter what happened in the fight against Steppenwolf and his army of parademons that Clark would always come first. He had promised himself that he would do better.

He leaned against the table on his elbows and rested his forehead against his hands, bowing his head as if in prayer, and after a long pause said, “I have to help him, Alfred.”

Alfred shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “If he asks, I’ll tell him that I helped you change your mind. And,” he added with that familiar dry lilt, “since I assume you’ll be giving those seeds back shortly, I will save you the trouble of installing that planter in your trophy room and do it myself.”

There was no planter in the trophy room, but there was a small, knowing smile on Alfred’s face.

The next week, Bruce found himself in a flower shop.

After his conversation with Alfred, and after several more hours of examining the few Kryptonian specimens in his possession and running simulations which reassured him that theoretically, the mineral spear that was also still in his possession could prove to be just as lethal to a rogue plant as it could a Kryptonian, Bruce had reached out to Clark.

The contents of his message were not important, nor had Bruce found a clever way to suggest a meeting that would take place outside the safety of the ship _and_ his own numerous strongholds, but it was a simple proposal and needed no further elaboration. They would meet in a nursery, flower shop, or any other landscaping and horticulture specialty store, and they would gather more useful materials than the few items that Clark had, and they would discuss the progress of the garden and what Clark’s goals for the species within were.

Bruce did not say this in so many words, but he had implied most of it and hoped that Clark would agree. And Clark had.

Clark had even picked the location.

“I kind of assumed that you’d dress down, but I didn’t expect this,” a voice said behind him. Bruce had just barely walked beneath the canopy that shielded numerous hanging plants from the summer sun. He glanced around surreptitiously, cataloguing his entry and exit routes and the number of people he could see were leisurely browsing the aisles from his position, and quickly realized that Clark’s voice was coming from the floating Chiefs hat that he could see just behind a row of sapling trees. “I guess it’s always extremes with you, huh?”

Clark was dressed as Bruce had most often seen him: comfortably, in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back and weathered jeans that looked as if they’d seen nothing but regular outdoor use for the past several days. He wore no sunglasses to hide his face, but he didn’t need them. Nobody would expect to see Superman wearing plaid in a Home Depot in a small town two hours away from Metropolis.

Bruce liked how well it worked for Clark. Clark was inconspicuous in civilian clothing, and Bruce had hoped that donning some plaid of his own would grant him the same protection.

“Don’t worry, I’ve always got a suit nearby.”

Clark chuckled quietly, then tilted his head toward the enclosed portion of the nursery where most of the plants and supplies sat on long rows of shelving. He looked as relaxed as Bruce had ever seen him, and he stepped inside without waiting, as if he’d been looking forward to an outing like this and Bruce had held him up long enough. “Come on. I’ve got a few ideas.”

“I’d like to hear them,” Bruce said. “And I’m eager to hear about the garden. I know it’s still early, but have you made any progress yet? Have you seen any new growth?”

It had been only a few days since they’d planted the seeds. Bruce had given Clark a day to cool off after his failed attempt at turning the conversation to Clark’s personal life, but so far Clark didn’t seem to be dwelling on it.

Clark led them to the right, where a collection of small decorative fountains trickled gently in a display, then paused to allow Bruce to catch up to him. “Yes, actually. I’ve been spending some time experimenting with the lighting, since it’s all indoor and I can’t take them out into the sunlight. The ship recommended trying different infrared wavelengths. Most of the natural, unmodified plants came from a time when the sun was younger. I guess that means it was more volatile back then, so there was some… I don’t know, some evolution to protect from the UV flares.”

Bruce nodded. The ship had mentioned something similar regarding a few species that most often thrived in areas that were constantly exposed to light; many of Krypton’s plants had evolved ways to synthesize UV-blocking coats to protect themselves in harsher, hotter environments. The ship had also suggested creating a light source and atmosphere to mimic that of Krypton’s natural environments, but Clark had never discussed it again.

“What did you do?”

“I altered the radiation,” Clark said. They had bypassed the decoration section and walked slowly together along a perimeter aisle where young cedars and spruces hid them from view. “It’s not completely red, but it’s not like the sun in this solar system. I also had to make some changes to the water that I was using.”

“What, city water wasn’t good enough for your special plants?”

“Surprisingly,” Clark said, and Bruce appreciated that his dry sarcasm had approximately as much bite as Alfred’s did. “Actually, I think it was the mineral content of the water.”

“Too much chlorine? Saline getting in the soil?”

“No, the—it was the water itself. The structure of water, just plain water, two hydrogen and an oxygen atom, didn’t seem to be sustaining the—some of the foreign strains,” he said, glancing around. “It did in their natural atmosphere, and I know it’s only been a few days, but I think it’s keeping them from taking root. They can’t… I mean, this only affected only some of them, but still, if some of these plants can’t metabolize water the way earth—uh, regular plants do...”

Bruce chuckled. Clark must not have spent much time discussing his home planet in vague terms. That, or he was especially concerned about outing himself as Superman in the lawn and garden centre. “I’m assuming you found a way to solve the problem? Or are we going to get some liquid fertilizer here and hope that does the trick?”

Clark cleared his throat. “Well, I ran some chemical simulations with the ship’s help and discovered that some of these plants, the ones that flourished best in moist environments, needed more nitrogen than was actually in the city water to metabolize, so we spent some time toying with the molecular structure. Just trying to see what might work best so that I don’t kill the ones that do like the water and I don’t kill the ones that need something different.”

Bruce couldn’t help but smile to himself. It was precisely what he would have done.

“Have you thought about nitrogen fixing the soil?”

“I’ve given it some thought.”

“You could bring in cyanobacteria.”

“Or do it myself,” Clark said. They rounded the aisle and began to wander up the next, and Clark paused to inspect a moderately-sized ivory halo dogwood, examining its leaves with an interest that Bruce could not discern as being genuine or feigned. 

“Or do it yourself,” Bruce acquiesced. “You have a plan? Introduce nitrate to the soil?”

“...Nitric acid, actually,” Clark said, and he sounded a little embarrassed, which was not a level of confidence that Bruce was used to hearing in people who had decided to work with nitric acid. “An acid mist, followed by a distilled water bath. I know there _was_ water on the planet, plain old H2O, so as long as the acid can soak into the soil in the sections that need it, I think it will be safe.”

Bruce whistled. His knowledge of horticulture was quite limited, but he could think of a few other things that would be safer than nitric acid. He recalled phosphorus as being a major concern during a few of Ivy’s more notable attempts to reclaim the city. Hell, he would have been willing to import manure. “So you’re going to try a little bit of everything.”

“Yep. And once I know for sure which ones prefer water and which respond better to the acid, assuming they do respond, I can figure out what they prefer for precipitation.”

Clark stopped at the end of the aisle to admire a diablo ninebark. Its dark leaves reminded Bruce of some of the plants that the ship had displayed. On Krypton, much of the foliage had been darker than that of the plants on earth, owing to the radiation spectrum and the light that was absorbed, and due to the variety of environments in which each seed that had been planted thrived, Bruce knew that Clark’s garden would eventually grow to be kaleidoscopic.

“So you don’t have anything growing yet?”

Clark paused briefly next to a selection of grasses, then rounded the corner and stopped to gaze intently at a display of fertilizers; Bruce meandered along behind him and waited politely, and after a moment Clark tucked two five-pound bags of Earth Juice underneath one arm.

“Nope. Nothing. Everything’s the same as it was.”

His brusqueness took Bruce aback, but it seemed only momentary. He was already in the next aisle eyeing up the rows of fragrant French lilac and juniper, pink and blue hydrangeas and white-frosted wintercreepers. Bruce leaned in, picked up a third bag of fertilizer, and followed.

“I really hope this project works for you, Clark. I know it’s important for you to be… connected to things that remind you of home.”

“And I know it’s important for you to keep people safe from them.”

Clark stopped in front of a burning bush and angled himself toward Bruce, turning his back to the elderly woman who had just entered the aisle from the front. He caught Bruce’s eye, then tipped his head subtly in the direction of the stranger, and Bruce gave him a subtle nod in return. He had, in all of his years of being Batman, never encountered an old lady whose eavesdropping had turned out to be a problem.

“I trust you,” Bruce said softly, taking a step closer to both Clark and the shrub, both of whom were, coincidentally, clad in red. “I know I’ve been pushing against this and I know you’ve been trying to accommodate my requests. And I…” 

Clark was watching him expectantly from beneath the brim of his cap, and it struck Bruce that while they were surrounded by a myriad of floral arrangements and still within earshot of an elderly lady who was most definitely not in the market for fertilizers that would grow alien plants, it was a highly inappropriate time to think about leaning in just a bit closer to discover whether, beneath the nearby lilac and lavender and peonies and the many other fragrances that filled the shop, he would find Clark’s own scent just as pleasing. 

“Thank you,” he said at last. “For coming out here. For letting me be part of this.” 

He could see Clark glance past him, still keeping an eye on the patron down the aisle.

“You’ve done far more than that for me,” Clark said, then met his gaze again. “This is the least I can do for you.” 

Clark stepped away and Bruce knew that the danger, along with the moment, had passed. 

“So,” Bruce said, following Clark as they resumed their meandering once more. “Nitric acid, fertilizer, sunlight. What else do you need to get the ball rolling? More shovels? Knee pads? A new pair of gloves?”

Clark grinned sheepishly and nudged a shoulder against Bruce’s. Bruce knew his body capable of deflecting bullets and missiles and blades, yet the gesture was so gentle it surprised him; Clark was a solidly-built man, nearly as tall as Bruce himself and just as wide, and if he’d wanted he could have shoved Bruce across the room with a gesture even more subtle than that. He’d done it before with little more than a flick of his wrist. But this was different. Friendly.

Maybe Bruce could begin to push boundaries after all.

“I dunno,” Clark said, his tone like a breath of fresh air. “But I don’t mind browsing. I’m sure we’ll find a few things I could use.”

At the end of the aisle, he reached for a small, empty planter. Bruce watched with raised brows as Clark turned it upside down, rapped his knuckles against the side, attempted and failed to tuck one of the bags of fertilizer into it for easy carrying, and ultimately tucked it carefully beneath his other arm before slipping between the next rows of flowers. 

For the next hour they wandered the store uninterrupted, examining more plants and planters and gardening tools of all sorts; Clark shook his head occasionally at the price tags on decorative pieces and novelty items, and Bruce offered to pick up the tab on a fountain that he had already decided would, before the summer was out, make an excellent addition to the Kent homestead.

He had also decided, briefly after offering Clark and his basketful of supplies a ride home, that nothing in the store had bloomed quite as brilliantly as Clark’s smile.

By chance, or perhaps entirely on purpose, Clark found Diana in Metropolis days later.

More accurately, Diana found Clark, and Clark wasn’t entirely sure how; one second he was making his way through the street, his hands stuffed in his pockets and his face hidden by his hat and downturned to avoid the light drizzle that had begun to pass over the city, and the next he had an arm linked around his own and found himself being tugged—rather, pulled by force, which was not something Clark was even remotely used to—off the street and into a coffee shop.

It was his first instinct to fight off his attacker, and it was his second instinct to flee. What was not instinct at all was to pull his hat further down over his head and hope that she did not notice that he was favouring one shoulder, and that was precisely what he did.

“Hi,” he said, equal amounts relieved and surprised to see a familiar face. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you were...”

“Here in the city? I admit it was an unplanned trip. But I’m happy to be here,” she said, and the brief alarm bells that had begun to sound off in his head went quiet once more as she smiled warmly at him and gestured at the quiet interior of the shop. “Would you like to take a seat?”

Diana gazed down at the phone, thumbing slowly through the photographs and pinch-zooming into others to inspect the finer details of the garden. In the single day that had passed since his meeting with Bruce (and subsequent application of nitric acid to the garden) a small group of the Kryptonian seeds had begun to sprout small, brownish fiddlehead-shaped sporophytes, and Clark had required the ship to alter the lighting for just long to take a photo that didn’t display everything in the room in shades of red and black. He’d never be a professional photographer, that much was obvious. Lois had always been better at taking photos anyway.

“This looks like a wonderful start, Clark. What made you decide to grow a garden, anyway?” she asked, and Clark found himself placing his hands on the table in front of him and lifting his shoulders in a faint shrug. It was only a slight movement, but he could feel the skin on his back scratching against the fabric of his shirt. It hadn’t even been a week since he and Victor had discovered the source of both the growths on his head and his back, but the thin layer of skin that had flaked off at Victor’s touch had grown back and was now thicker and itchier than before. 

In a way, he was thankful that Victor had helped him realize what the cause was. He would have relied on his own investigative skills otherwise; Clark could count on one hand the number of times he remembered being cut or bruised, which would have ruled out keloid scars that grew with repeated tissue trauma, and he knew that whatever mark left by the creature that had murdered him wouldn’t have left a mark on his shoulder. He was certain his skin must have shed dead cells like everyone else, but that wouldn’t explain the way his flesh had hardened, growing almost keratotic in the span of days.

But now he knew. He knew, and all he could do now was ignore it and hope desperately that Diana wouldn’t notice anything amiss.

“You mean in general, or in that specific room?”

“I think the reason for the chamber was obvious,” Diana said. “But why install a garden? Why not just rebuild?”

Clark shifted again, attempting to dislodge the part of his shirt that caught against his skin. He had done well to not scratch at his scalp or his shoulder in front of Bruce, but today it was impossible to will the itch away, and the best that he could do to satisfy it without removing the bark-like growth was rest his hand against his back and apply pressure without scratching. It was not satisfying in the least. The sensation was maddening. “I don’t know. I kept seeing the inside of that chamber and I… honestly, it reminded me of Pozharnov. That Russian town.”

A tiny smile crept over Diana’s face. If she noticed his fidgeting, she was kind enough not to bring it up. “It was beautiful at the end. Is that what you mean?”

Diana had remained for the specimen roundup that had occurred shortly after, when the Russian government had fought a legal battle for collection of the innumerable Apokoliptian specimens that had sprouted up in the village after Steppenwolf’s hold had been broken. The twisted crystal pillars, flowers, mosses, and all other traces of Apokolips’ insidious influence had been harvested and distributed across various laboratories for examination and testing. Even the rubble from Steppenwolf’s spire had been collected and shuttled off for study, and the acquisition had likely been like Christmas morning for a number of geologists, botanists, and numerous others involved in astrobiology, astrobotany, and similar astro- fields Clark couldn’t put a name to. The incident had been so well-contained that the only major concern had been the transmission of unknown illnesses, diseases, pollen, and the like—and even that hadn’t been a concern, as Victor had scanned them shortly before the government had swarmed in to determine whether there was any imminent threat and, with the help of his connection to the Mother Boxes and Apokolips, deemed them safe.

He remembered suddenly that Bruce had been concerned then, too, about the alien flora falling into the possession of certain people in Gotham. Whoever these people were, they must have been able to work wonders with flowers.

Clark smiled back, encouraged by Diana’s fondness of what had ultimately been a very, _very_ close fight. If she could look upon the memory with a smile, however small, then maybe it was safe for him to do so too “Yeah, that’s what I mean. I guess I just think it’s interesting that the only time we see non-threatening alien invasions is when they come in the form of… plants.”

“So you intend to threaten the world with an invasion of flowers?”

Clark couldn’t help but laugh, and even Diana chuckled quietly. “Maybe next year. For now, I’d like to prove that I can grow something in there that isn’t going to murder anyone. So I found this.”

He stopped for a moment to show her a planter that ran the entire length of one of the Kryptonian hallways. He’d planted grasses there, inspired by a sedge plant that had caught his eye during his trip to the garden centre with Bruce, and they looked comedically out of place against the colourless Kryptonian architecture.

Diana rested her chin in her hand and gazed at him, and Clark couldn’t help thinking how regal she looked, so warm and inviting even in her usual elegant civilian attire. She had radiated that warmth for as long as he’d known her, and when she spoke she had a way of adding gravity to her words, of drawing one’s attention in almost without effort. Even now Clark wanted to tell her of the problems he’d been having, the secrets he’d been forced to keep: the dreams, the bark emerging from his skin, the nubs that had slowly begun to push their way through hairless patches on his scalp... the knowledge that things were not all right.

“You want to help create life where there was only death and destruction before. I think that is a beautiful thing, Clark.” She sat upright and looked around the shop, then leaned in conspiratorially. “There is a myth they told in Ancient Greece about this, you know. In the story, the god Apollo created a flower from the blood shed by his lover. Life from death,” she said, inclining her head with a coy smile. “Does it sound like a familiar story?”

It sounded like Clark needed to brush up on his Greek mythology.

“You know I wouldn’t consider myself a god. And I’m only planting seeds, not blood,” Clark said. He’d heard far too many Jesus comparisons in the past few years, heard people make too many references to Clark as a saviour, the Almighty. It made him think of Bruce in extremis— _you were never even a man_ , he’d said in that horrible mechanical growl—and Clark found his hand frozen on his shoulder, his fingers curled mid-scratch.

“Maybe not, but you are still doing a wonderful and selfless thing.”

Clark opened his mouth and promptly closed it as the waiter approached, bringing their standard pastry-and-specialty-drink orders with him and providing Clark with a moment to attempt to reframe his view. They thanked him together, and when he walked away, Diana unfolded her napkin and smiled gently at Clark. “It is nice to be reminded that there is still some good in the world.”

“I’m glad you see it that way,” he said quietly, then cleared his throat. He’d had enough of discussing himself when Diana had been away for so long. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t catch up on his life, as Barry had taken to requesting progress photos daily in the group conversation on his phone. “So what brings you to Metropolis, anyway? Business?”

“Of a sort. I came to collect something from the Schaffenberger, to take back to Paris.” She paused and watched as Clark scratched his shoulder self-consciously. “You know everyone is worried about you, Clark.”

Of course. Business wouldn’t be enough to bring Diana halfway across the world, but an intervention would do the trick.

“Was it Bruce who sent you?”

“Bruce? Of course not,” she said with a quiet laugh. “My business is unrelated to him. He may believe that we are all at his beck and call, but he forgets that many of us have lives outside of this area. However…”

She leaned forward again and rested her hand over Clark’s this time. “You know better than anyone that he cares for you. He may be too stubborn to say so, but you are important to him. You’re important to all of us.”

She squeezed his hand gently, just once, and all Clark felt was something subtly shift beneath his hat. He recognized it, with that same cold, gnawing horror that gripped him each time he clawed his way free in his dreams, as the faint, painless, yet unmistakable sensation of something breaking through his skin.

Clark flew to the ship the moment Diana was out of sight.

Normally, without his suit on underneath his clothing, he wouldn’t risk it, but he had felt a warmth oozing from his scalp and soaking slowly into the fabric of his cap during the last half hour of their outing, and he knew that a quick exit was going to be necessary. He’d kept Diana in front of him at all times, careful not to turn his back for even a moment—“After you,” he’d said, and she’d given him a smile that meant she knew it was no chivalrous deed and allowed it—and, after ducking into the closest alley, had made his way into the sky, the sounds of the city falling away as he focused on making it to the only safe haven he had left.

He’d known that the disease, the mutation, or whatever it could be called was spreading, and he knew that it would only get worse before it got better, but he hadn’t been prepared for this; the skin on his back had cracked and bled, too, and he could feel it drawing tight across his shoulders, the same dark ichor seeping into his shirt as he descended directly through the government facility and landed in front of the ship, and he was already halfway inside when he pulled off his hat and felt the top of his head, searching frantically for signs of the disturbance he’d felt.

And then he found it.

A small protrusion, a nub, smooth underneath the sticky mess that was not quite blood, had split the skin of his scalp and pushed through; Clark’s hand came away dark and wet, with hair stuck to the mess, and he could feel his heart racing in his chest, a thunderous sound that drowned out the rest.

In an instant he was at the ship’s medical bay, or what remained of it. There were no mirrors, no damned mirrors for him to look in, and his voice was shaky when he told the ship, “I need a mirror. Get me a mirror, a—anything, just anything, I need to see what’s happening.”

He could not tell if the robot that whirred around the corner at that precise moment was one that had been summoned by the ship just now, or one that had simply been passing by at the correct moment, but it began to change as it approached him, forming a three-dimensional replica of his face out of its liquid display, and as Clark leaned in and gripped the bot with one hand to hold it in place to focus on the protrusion on the top of his head he saw—and felt, horrifyingly, in real time—a second one begin to push through a hairless patch on the other side of his skull.

He shoved the robot away; it clattered against the opposite wall without complaint, but Clark was no longer watching; he fumbled in his pocket for the phone Bruce had given him, leaving sticky fingerprints on the screen as he searched for the button that would put him in contact with Victor.

_It’s worse_

_I need your help_

He slumped against the floor, hitting the base of the examination table with a shaky exhale. It didn’t hurt him, but the sensation was dulled on his back, numbed by the rough skin that had begun to harden and had grown almost plate-like. Thick though it was, the skin would almost certainly crack and shift again, and Clark had no doubt that, like a keloid scar, it would be larger still before the day was through.

And then his phone rang.

He swallowed the lump that had risen into his throat and stared at the screen. A bat symbol flashed across it, filling Clark with a renewed terror as he realized his mistake. Bruce knew. He wouldn’t be calling if he didn’t know. Victor had done what he had promised and gone to Bruce, and now Bruce would know what he’d done. Bruce would find him, would see the bark slowly crawling over his back and the hair on the floor and the blood-sap on Clark’s hands, and he would know.

Clark tapped the green button and swallowed again. He steeled himself. He lifted the phone to his ear.

“Yes.”

“Clark! I’m glad you picked up, because I didn’t set up a voicemail system,” Bruce said with a suspicious amount of audible relief. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I? I thought about sending a text first, but then…”

He trailed off and there was a pause as he waited for a reply. Clark gripped the phone as tightly as he could without shattering it.

“This is…” Clark swallowed again. His throat was dry, though whether from terror or from his current condition, he couldn’t discern. “A bad time.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, and over the phone Bruce took a breath. Clark tried to listen for more, and could hear only the faint hum of the ship.

“Oh,” Bruce said. “Well, ah, I’ll leave you alone. I only wanted to ask if you’d heard from Diana, she… reached out to me a few minutes ago and said she was across the bay. I thought I’d let you know in case you hadn’t heard. Thought you might want to show her your garden.”

Clark laughed without meaning to, a sad, wet sound. Tears stung his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “I will. Thanks, Bruce.”

There was another pause as Clark pulled the phone away from his ear, and Clark’s finger was already over the red button when he realized that Bruce, who most often severed a connection without a goodbye, hadn’t yet hung up.

“—Okay?”

Clark cleared his throat and lifted the phone again. “Sorry?”

“I said is everything okay? You sound…”

Bruce didn’t need to finish his sentence. Clark knew precisely how he sounded.

“Yeah.”

Clark took another breath. The front of his shoulder tingled and began to itch, and he squeezed his eyes shut and felt a tear slide down his cheek.

“Are you sure? Do you want me to send—should I drop in later?”

It was, for the first time in recent memory, the first time someone had actually, genuinely attempted to check in on Clark. Even Victor was waiting for Clark to reach out, to let him know when to leap into action, and although Lois and Mom were always a phone call away and would always answer when he needed them, they had no knowledge of what was happening to him.

“No,” he said quickly. “No, I…”

Any excuse that came to mind felt feeble. Flimsy. Even if Clark managed to throw Bruce off the scent now, Bruce would find out eventually that something was amiss. He would find out through Victor, or through Clark, or through Diana, and he would discover a fragment of the truth that Clark wished so desperately to keep from him, and Clark was not sure what he would do when that time came. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing now.

He was afraid. That he was sure of.

“Actually, yes. You should drop in.” Clark pressed his palm over his shoulder and squeezed until it hurt and the itch was gone. He could suppress this for a short while. He’d done it before. If this was a flare-up, he could weather it until it was safe to let it affect him. “Any time. Whenever you can. I’m here at the ship.”

He could hear something shuffling on Bruce’s end, but once again his hearing did not extend beyond the ship. “Okay. Give me a few minutes. I’ll see you soon, Clark.” Bruce hung up without another word, and despite the overwhelming sense of distress that still held him in its grasp, Clark couldn’t help but laugh.

He’d have to tell Victor to wait until the evening. It was going to be a long afternoon, struggling to keep his hands away from his back and shoulders and head. He’d need to shower, change his clothing, and probably find a new hat, but he felt better knowing that Bruce was on his way. 

He and Victor would find a way to deal with this together. They would find a way to solve it. All Clark had to do was make it through the day.

The entire garden was red.

Initially, Clark had hoped that he could avoid changing the atmosphere to anything even remotely Kryptonian. His body had initially rejected it on Zod’s ship, but although he had adapted Clark had never forgotten the way his mind had clouded and his body had failed. His experience with Kryptonian things was, thus far, extremely unpleasant, but it was obvious that no matter how much fertilizer he poured on, the seeds needed a familiar, nurturing atmosphere for long enough to take seed before Earth’s atmosphere strengthened them the way it did him. Red sun radiation, acidic precipitation. Neither affected Clark. It was simply something he needed to do.

“Your eyes might need a moment to adjust,” he warned Bruce, who walked alongside him in the dark, armoured undersuit that he had grown used to seeing when pieces of the Batsuit came off. “Not that there’s much to look at yet.”

It had been just under an hour since Bruce had spoken with him on the phone. It was enough time to shower and find a change of clothes, but Clark had to be careful. Minor movements pulled at the skin of his back, threatening to open the wound once more. He hadn’t even bothered to put on a pair of socks.

“That’s alright. At least you’ve made some progress. You think the fertilizer’s helping?”

“I’ve been trying so many things that I’m not sure which is working and which isn’t,” Clark admitted. “But I know for sure it’s helping with this guy.” 

He was close enough that reaching for the blades didn’t bother his back, and he ran his fingers over them gently, then reached for the soil to test its dryness. The blades whispered against his skin, and before Clark even reached the base of the plant he knew with sudden certainty that they did not require water yet. 

“They look nice,” Bruce said. “Did we see those the other day?”

Clark turned toward him and readjusted his hat. He’d have to be careful not to let Bruce see him from the back, just as a precaution. “Yeah, we did.” 

They had stopped outside the door to the Genesis Chamber, but before Bruce could step into it Clark held up a hand and said, “Just a second. Before you go in—ship, reveal the chamber.”

The interlocking pieces of the door, made of the same opaque, chitinous material as the rest of the ship, shimmered and seemed to melt away; the door was still visible from the right angle, but had become almost entirely transparent. “It’s kind of a party trick,” Clark explained. “So you can see inside without entering. It’s just a protective measure in case something goes wrong, or if the acid bath cycle has just passed. But for now… ship, open the door.”

The door shimmered back into opaqueness and began to slide open, and Clark tilted his head, indicating that Bruce was welcome to enter.

Bruce gazed at him for only a moment, then stepped inside.

“I know it wasn’t much to look at last time, but the photos don’t quite do it justice,” Clark said. He was still sending progress pictures for Barry, and although Bruce hadn’t commented on the garden’s appearance beyond the occasional thumbs-up emoji, Clark could see him cataloguing every new detail: the small pond on the left side of the chamber, now filled with water that shimmered like a lake of blood and ringed with tiny black shoots that were perhaps two inches tall; the shed, filled now with fertilizer and the equipment that Bruce had purchased for him at the Home Depot; rows upon rows of plants in various stages of growth, some so tiny that at first glance the earth still appeared bare and some as high as Clark’s knee. There were patches of black near the pond where ground cover plants had begun to reach out with broad, flat leaves, and at the far end of the garden, beneath the backlit amniotic tank, a cluster of blackbrush grew like dark pinpricks and had already begun to turn toward the tank’s light.

“You’re right,” Bruce murmured, still surveying the chamber. “They really don’t.”

He began to step down into the garden, and Clark watched as he placed one boot tentatively on the soil, then the next. “How’s the nitric acid working out?”

“Seems to work fine,” Clark said. He followed and stepped into the garden next to Bruce, and smiled sheepishly when Bruce glanced pointedly at his bare feet. “The plants seem to be thriving in it, even if they don’t need it. There isn’t enough acid in the soil to melt your shoes, if that’s what you’re worried about.” 

Bruce made a thoughtful sound and took another step, then another, eyeing the dirt path that had been flattened between the rows. He seemed satisfied enough with Clark’s reassurance. Maybe he’d been telling the truth when he said that he trusted Clark. It would make it far easier to approach the subject of Clark’s problems if he did. “When you’re working with nitric acid, it doesn’t hurt to clarify. But if this is what you do in place of nitrogen fixing, I’d hate to see what you’d use instead of phosphorus.” 

He stopped for a moment, nudging the toe of his boot against a puffball-esque growth that was approximately the size of a hamburger, then glanced up as the ship chimed with an announcement. “Attention: ten minutes remaining until irrigation cycle.”

“Which comes first? The acid or the rain?”

“Acid first, then water,” Clark said. The path wasn’t wide enough for him to walk side-by-side with Bruce, so he wandered just behind and to the side of him instead. “I can pause the cycle, or skip the acid bath for now. We don’t have a time limit in here.”

“Everything Kryptonian grows eternal.”

Clark waited for him to elaborate, or perhaps to start questioning him about his earlier outburst, but Bruce simply continued to walk. They were near the pond now, and he gazed into it with a thoughtful noise, then knelt and examined the tiny furls of foliage that grew like fiddleheads by the water’s edge.

“Well, we both know things from my planet have a bad habit of not staying dead,” Clark said.

Bruce glanced up at him with a raised brow, and for a moment Clark expected a shadow to darken his face. Instead, Bruce grinned up at him, then pushed himself to his feet with a low groan.

“I can’t argue with that. Do you think the plants will be the same?”

“The same how?” he asked, then: “You mean stronger than you?” 

He tried to keep his tone light, and it seemed like his humour had found its mark. Bruce gazed at him for several seconds, mouth slightly open in disbelief, and then laughed. It was the first time Clark had heard more than an amused snort or quiet chuckle out of him.

“Wow,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to say nice things in front of plants. Don’t they grow better when you talk to them?”

Clark shrugged cautiously and gave Bruce the warmest smile he could muster. “Dunno. Keep complimenting them and maybe we’ll find out.”

They continued to make their way around the garden, pushing back the irrigation cycle to prolong the tour of new growth. Bruce seemed to be in good spirits, and Clark found his mood contagious; despite the itch that had spread from his back into his shoulder, he couldn’t see any change to his skin, and he hadn’t felt anything unusual happening beneath his hat. He’d been careful to comb out as much of the loose hair as possible before Bruce had arrived and had prepared an entire story about a haircut just in case, but Bruce seemed content to make comfortable smalltalk about the plants, the atmosphere, the soil, and most of his other garden-related interests: yes, the light spectrum had changed, but no, the change was not drastic enough to affect Clark in any way, especially when he only turned it on in cycles; no, the soil had not been obtained illegally, exactly, but Clark had at least been careful to direct Barry to areas where no one would miss a few buckets of topsoil; maybe the plants would decompose if picked, and maybe they would remain as Clark and Zod had, inert and lifeless and forever unchanging.

“You didn’t think to pick one and see?” Bruce asked. “You could just leave it out for a few hours.”

“I’m trying to grow the seeds, not kill them,” Clark said, and couldn’t help but be reminded once more of Bruce’s previous comment: _growing flowers instead of monsters._ “When they’re fully grown, I’ll figure out what to do with them. If I need to burn them, or eject them into space, or shred them with my bare hands… I won’t leave anything to chance, and you won’t need to worry about what I’m doing in here.”

“Ah, I’m not…” Bruce shook his head and looked around the room again, like he expected his next words to pop up out of the ground. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m always looking over your shoulder. This garden, this… Genesis Garden of Eden thing, it’s important to you, and I want you to be happy here.” He paused, tilting his head at Clark with a small smile. “Are you, Clark?”

Happy? Clark felt like asking what on earth Bruce thought he had to be happy about. He was alive, sure, having been generously granted a second chance by Bruce himself, but it was his continued lifespan that was the catalyst for the way his body was changing, and there was nothing happy about that. He was living in the ship, hiding away from the world because he wasn’t sure he could go back out into it. The people he was closest to would be devastated if they thought there was a chance they would lose him again.

And the world wasn’t ready to see Superman tearing at his own skin, molting like some disgusting insect.

“I’m… thankful,” he said. He could find a way to convince himself that it had some truth to it, but he didn’t think he could lie to Bruce outright. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

Bruce nodded. 

“When you said that things were different between you and Lois… that things had changed… did you mean you?”

Clark blinked at Bruce, furrowing his brow as he attempted to decipher the question.

“I…”

“I know it’s a personal question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But I’ve been thinking, I’ve been… trying to listen more and speak less.” Bruce stopped and turned to face him. “Superman hasn’t been seen in almost weeks. Maybe a sighting here and there, but nobody’s being rescued from burning buildings. Planes with broken engines aren’t being pulled from the sky. Superman’s back, but he hasn’t been present.”

Clark scoffed quietly. Bruce had his attention in the beginning, st least. “You told me to take a vacation and now you’d like me to get back to work.”

“That’s not it at all,” Bruce said, and was interrupted by the ship chiming:

“Attention: five minutes remaining until irrigation cycle.”

“Then why bother telling me to stand down?” Clark asked without taking his eyes away from Bruce. “If that’s not it, then what? Maybe the world doesn’t need Superman right now. It’s got you, Diana, Arthur, Barry, Victor, the—Red Cyclone, or whoever. You said it yourself, Bruce. I don’t have to do this alone anymore.”

“That doesn’t mean I want you to give up,” Bruce said gently. “The world does need Superman. And you might not believe it, but I want to see him out there, too, just like everyone else… but I also want you to be okay with it.” 

His tone wasn’t patronizing in the least, but it bothered Clark; it was caring and sincere, and Clark almost would have preferred that he be angry about it. It would be easier to keep Bruce at arm’s length if he didn’t seem to care, and yet all Clark wanted to do was take Bruce up on his offer, confide in him, tell him that things were not what they seemed, that he didn’t yet have a plan to make everything okay… that he wasn’t sure anybody could.

Bruce was still gazing at him, waiting for a reply, but Clark didn’t have anything left to give.

“That means something to me,” he said, because it was the only truth he could give, but as he began to step away Bruce stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. 

“Wait.”

“We need to let the cycle start,” Clark muttered, and to his surprise Bruce’s grip simply tightened and held him in place. 

“And we will. Do you know anything about geotaxis?”

Clark stared up at him. He’d never been stopped by any human before. He was not sure if it was in any way related but he could feel, through the soil beneath his feet, the plants shivering faintly in displeasure.

“It’s an ability plants have. The ones here on this planet, and probably some of the ones on yours. It’s the way they sense the gravitational field. How they know that roots grow into the earth and the rest grow out of it. Its connection to gravity is what steers the plant as it starts to grow.”

Clark stood in place. Bruce’s hand was still on his shoulder, rendering him immobile in a way that Clark was very much not accustomed to. His skin felt like it was burning beneath his shirt. 

“Okay.”

“But once the growth begins,” Bruce said, “a different mechanism takes over, one that relies on light, overriding it so that a flower will turn toward the sun and get as much sunlight as it can. So sometimes that initial instinct is—sometimes it’s just the beginning, and what really helps the individual flourish is the instinct that comes after, when it finally has the ability to react to the signal it’s been getting. It moves toward the light because it knows that’s the right thing to do to survive.

“My instincts about you were wrong,” he continued, and if Clark wasn’t sure where this lesson was going before, he understood clearly now. “But now that I can see you, I—”

He didn’t get the chance to finish. Clark had his arms around Bruce’s middle before Bruce could even comprehend what was happening, and in a single, swift motion he relocated Bruce into the hall directly in front of the Genesis Chamber. The grass along the wall rustled angrily as Clark and Bruce came to a halt, and as the door slid shut and shimmered out of view once again, Clark turned and saw the clear, foul-smelling mist of nitric acid beginning to cloud the interior of the chamber.

Bruce steadied himself against the planter as Clark released him. It seemed to take him a few seconds to realize what had happened in that brief period of time, and by the time he looked back at Clark, realization dawning on his face, the warmth from his body was little more than a phantom sensation against Clark’s skin.

“You don’t need to explain. I already forgave you,” Clark said. A single point of warmth began to trickle down his back, and all he could think about was pressing himself against Bruce’s body again.

Bruce had much to think about.

A few days had passed since Clark had rushed him out of the nitric acid bath. Clark was still responding regularly, not to Bruce but to Barry, which seemed a positive sign. At least he was communicating, if only via crimson-filtered plant photography. It meant that he wanted to talk, maintain contact.

Bruce only wished that Clark would maintain contact with him. 

After removing Bruce from harm’s way, Clark had made an excuse about meeting up with someone and bid Bruce farewell. Superman still hadn’t been sighted, which must have meant that Clark had either left the ship undercover, or hadn’t left the ship at all; given recent events, Bruce would have placed money on the latter, but he didn’t wish to speculate on how Clark spent his spare time. 

It would be okay to keep some distance between them. Bruce had stepped into dangerous territory on the ship; Clark had not been expecting Bruce to touch him, nor had he seemed to understand what point Bruce was trying to make as he navigated his way through a simplistic version of plant trophism. On the other hand, Bruce had not been expecting Clark to touch him, and he hadn’t expected the way Clark gazed at him after, the blue of his eyes tinted with the red from the nearby chamber.

Bruce could have kissed him.

It was hard to stop thinking about Clark after. He had thought about Clark constantly beforehand, but there had been something in his voice in that phone call, and something about the way he’d answered Bruce’s questions in the ship that caught his attention. There was something that he was concealing, and Bruce was sure it had something to do with what had happened since his return. Things weren’t flourishing for him the way Bruce had expected them to, and likely weren’t matching up to Clark’s expectations either. Whatever it was that kept him in that ship had come dangerously close to surfacing, and Bruce berated himself for not pushing for more information before he left.

He berated himself, too, for fantasizing that Clark might have opened up to him if Bruce _had_ kissed him, for thinking that if he’d simply gripped Clark in the exhilarating seconds after being removed from the garden and pressed himself against him, if he’d remained long enough to drag Clark back into the garden for the water bath and let the irrigation mist soak into their clothing.

But Clark had forgiven him, and he would accept that until a time when Clark felt comfortable enough to open up to him fully.

Night had just begun to fall. It was an official work night after an official work day. The manor was still being renovated, but there was little that Bruce could do to help at this stage and he found himself working from home instead, hunched over his desk with papers scattered about and his phone lying quiet on the desktop. He rarely did any of his nighttime business up here and had little to conceal from unexpected visitors. but it startled him nonetheless when a knock came at the door just behind him. He was used to being able to hear guests walking up the front stairs, and he was more used to expecting guests before they had a chance to sneak up on him—but as he turned and squinted at the figure outlined against the dark backdrop of the trees, his suspicion melted into relief.

It was the first time Bruce had seen Clark in Gotham—or Gotham’s outskirts—since the battle at the docks.

One of his hands was occupied. A small planter was tucked against Clark’s side, and he lifted it for Bruce to see as Bruce pushed himself away from his desk and got up to open the door. 

“Clark,” he said, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. “I didn’t realize you were on your way, or I would have… why don’t you come in? Sit down with me. Can I take your jacket?”

He gestured toward the dining table on the other side of the door. Clark seemed to be dressed for a cooler evening, or at least one in the public eye; his flannel jacket and hat didn’t suggest a business meeting, but Bruce was more interested in the planter than he was in Clark’s clothing. He recognized it as the one Clark had purchased on their shopping trip, only now it was full of soil.

Clark placed it atop the table, straightened up, and looked at Bruce. “Alfred’s not here?”

“Gone home for the night. He stays some nights, but tonight’s been a work night of a different kind. Things he can offer advice on but can’t help with.” He offered Clark a small smile and leaned against his desk, crossing his arms over his chest. “And what about you? It’s been a while since you’ve been on this side of the city. Are you wearing something special under all that?”

He tipped his head, indicating Clark’s layered appearance, and the barely perceptible crease that formed on Clark’s forehead told him that he was already toeing a line tonight.

“No, I’m… I’m not.” He slid his hands into his pockets and nodded down at the planter on the table. “I’m not staying for very long, but I thought I would… leave this with you,” he said after apparent deliberation. “It’s a gift. From the garden. No strings attached, no… conditions, no…”

He shrugged, then cleared his throat. “You don’t happen to have any water, do you?”

“Water? Yeah, hold on.”

It took less than a minute for Bruce to make his way to the kitchen, pour a glass of water, and return to Clark with it. It was difficult to tell with the lights down low, but up close Clark looked extremely tired; he offered a brief smile when Bruce handed him the glass, then pulled out a chair and sat at the table.

“Thank you. Take a look at the…” He gestured at the planter, and Bruce waited long enough for him to take a sip before pulling the planter closer to examine.

“From the ship, you said? Is it one of the seeds that hasn’t grown yet?”

“No, it’s actually one we didn’t plant. Still in the safe zone for humans, so you don’t have to worry about it doing anything weird or… and it just takes water. And maybe a little bit of plant food. I don’t really know whether you’re supposed to fertilize house plants.” He laughed a little, but it was subdued, distracted; his elbows rested on the table and he was fidgeting somewhat, wringing his hands slowly in a gesture that seemed very unlike Clark. Bruce thought about resting his own hand on them, but was not sure whether Clark would take that as a calming gesture or as something else.

He wasn’t sure which he would have meant it as, either.

“Hm,” he said, leaning over the table to stare into the soil. “Does it have a name? Do we know how much sunlight it needs? Does it like cold or warm temperatures?”

“Good questions. That’s why I brought this,” Clark said, and Bruce glanced up when Clark took one of his hands from the planter and pressed something against his palm. It was a familiar gesture, the same that Bruce had done when he’d given Clark the phone, and he found Clark watching him from beneath the brim of his cap with an unexpectedly intense expression.

“This contains the entire database of Kryptonian flora from the scout ship. It’s a compendium of everything that’s on the ship, everything we planted in the garden, including what’s in that,” he said, nodding at the planter, “and any other information I could find about plants that had been engineered or discovered on Krypton up until the ship’s last contact logs and data transfers. It’s all there.”

He released Bruce’s hand, and Bruce gazed down at a flash drive no larger than his finger; it ended in a neat USB connector and had an angular head that Bruce recognized as Superman’s crest. The drive was warm from the heat of Clark’s hand, and Bruce curled his fingers around it and bowed his head.

“I don’t know how to thank you for this,” Bruce said.

Clark took another sip from his glass. “I don’t want you to. You can do what you want with the information, but make sure that whoever those people are that you’re worried about, the ones who… wanted to use the flowers in Pozharnov, the ones who could use my plants… make sure they never see this.”

He finished off his glass and pushed himself to his feet. His movement was slow and uncharacteristically cautious; strong though he was, Bruce had never seen Clark move with anything but effortlessness and certainty, and while he’d wanted to believe Clark’s previous claims that things were okay, Bruce found himself less and less sure.

Bruce rose with Clark and stepped around the table. He couldn’t block off the door, but he could walk Clark to it. 

“You’re leaving already?”

“You’re busy and I don’t want to keep you.”

“Are you going somewhere? I mean—is there somewhere you need to be right now? Would you sit down with me for a while?”

Clark gave him a small, unconvincing smile. “I’m actually going to meet Barry. He’s helping me pick something up from Kansas. I’m sorry. I would stay longer if I could,” he added, and it felt sincere enough that Bruce knew he wouldn’t be able to talk Clark into lingering without revealing some hidden plans of his own.

“I guess I’ll just have to get in line,” Bruce said, reaching for the door. “After you.”

He led Clark out from beneath the roof overhang and onto the deck overlooking the lake. There was no car waiting in the driveway, but he’d assumed Clark had flown anyway. The cotton-cloth clouds that had blanketed the sky in the afternoon had begun to clear, and fragments of the night sky were visible as the clouds crawled across the stars.

Clark was watching them. He gazed upward with an expression that was harder to parse, this far away from the light. Bruce wondered whether he was thinking about his planet, or whether he saw something in the stars that Bruce did not; a breeze swirled around them, whispering in the trees surrounding the lake and tugging at both Bruce’s hair and Clark’s open jacket, and he pulled it close and tucked his hands back into his pockets with a measured sigh.

“It’s so quiet out here, away from the city.”

“It has its perks,” Bruce agreed. He gazed out across the lake, and when he looked at Clark again he saw that Clark had closed his eyes. He looked serene against the dark foliage that surrounded the lake, his profile peaceful, handsome even with a hat pulled low over his face. Though he couldn’t put his finger on it, Bruce couldn’t shake the feeling that something was out of place. Clark had just given him what was arguably one of the most important flora compendiums on the planet, and his attention wasn’t on Bruce at all now.

“Do you hear anything? See anything?”

Clark’s hearing would have extended far beyond Gotham, but all Bruce could hear was the gentle lap of water beneath their feet and the breeze that still stirred the tops of the trees; somewhere in the surrounding forest a twig snapped, and Clark twitched suddenly, blinking his eyes open with a frown.

“I need to leave,” he said. He took a step back and let out a breath, glancing first at the house and then at Bruce. “I’m sorry, Bruce, I have to—”

“Clark, if something’s going on, you can—you need to share it with me,” Bruce said, his voice low and urgent. “You haven’t looked comfortable since you arrived, and the other day, on the phone—”

“Don’t worry about me,” Clark said firmly. “I have something I need to do.” His tone suggested that this was non-negotiable, and he adjusted his hat with one hand and pushed himself up into the air, five feet, then ten, then twenty.

Bruce gazed up at him, and he could see Clark staring back down at him, as if daring him to say something more. The flash drive was still warm against Bruce’s palm, and Bruce suddenly had more things to say than his mouth would allow. He wanted to demand that Clark stay long enough to explain precisely why he’d been behaving so strangely, to offer support, to give him a safe place in which to speak and a willing ear to listen, and he wanted to leap into the sky and pull Clark down into the lake and kiss him for being so infuriatingly kind and trusting and—

the sky echoed with thunder, and the lake rippled as Clark aimed for the clouds and disappeared.

Bruce stared into the sky, watching as the dark and distant shape of Clark became a darker and more distant vapour cone aimed in the direction of Metropolis.

Maybe it had been foolish of him to think that Clark would trust him enough to confide in him, and maybe it had been foolish to ever believe that things would be fine when he came back. It was obvious that something was going on with Clark. If Bruce had missed the signs before, or if he had simply been too willing to accept that Clark was telling him the truth when he’d said that things were fine, he had no one to blame but himself.

Then there was the matter of the drive. It was Kryptonian in design, that much was true, but what if Clark had placed something on it that Bruce was meant to find? What if the drive contained some clue as to what was happening and Clark had left it for Bruce to decode? And the planter—there was no guarantee that it contained a seed at all. He had no reason to think that anything Clark told him was the truth.

He was going to need a second opinion.

With the drive still in his hand, Bruce turned his back on the dissipating vapour trail in the sky and slid his phone from his pocket. “Victor Stone,” he said, and his phone lit up at his command, then flickered and went dark.

“You can just use my first name, you know,” said Victor’s voice. “What’s up?”

“Victor, I need to know if you can interface with the Kryptonian ship,” Bruce said. “I have a piece of Kryptonian technology here and I’m going to need some help cracking it open.”

There was a pause. “I can help translate if you need me to,” Victor said slowly.

“Perfect. I’ll see you soon.”

Out of habit, Bruce attempted to hang up the phone, but the call wasn’t even connected. He tapped the screen, pressed a few buttons. The phone didn’t even appear to be operational.

“You mean soon as in right now?”

“Soon as in at your earliest convenience,” Bruce said. He gazed at the portion of the planter that was still visible inside the house from the dock, then glanced back at the sky. The vapour cone was mostly gone. Bruce could hardly see it against the clouds. “By the way, have you heard from Clark recently?”

“Why, did something happen?”

“Nothing at all,” Bruce murmured, still gazing at the sky. He wondered if Clark could hear him now. It was easy to picture his reaction: _Bruce? Paranoid? Yeah, that sounds like him._ “I’ll see you in a few.”

He hung up, or at least pressed the sleep button and hoped that Victor would intuit that the conversation had ended, and as he was slipping his phone back in his pocket he glanced down and saw, where Clark had stood on the dock with his hands hidden from view, several small, black droplets glimmered faintly in the light from the house.

Victor sighed from his pocket. “Yeah, I’ll be there. See you soon.”

Bruce knelt and swiped a finger over one of the droplets. It was too dark to see precisely what he was looking at, but he knew that it was not water from the lake and that no raindrops had fallen from the sky. It stained his fingers dark, and he looked from his hand to the sky and wondered what could possibly make Superman bleed.

Clark was not sure that he would make it to Metropolis.

He had never taken his flight for granted. He’d grown used to it, had learned to perfect it and to test its limits, but he had never once forgotten the the first failed leaps that he’d taken toward the sky, or the feeling of crashing head-first into a mountain. It hadn’t taken long to gain mastery over the earth’s gravitational pull, and he had always been able to feel it at all times, had always been aware of his position in space the way a person knew the position of a hand or a leg.

And suddenly, all at once, he couldn’t feel it.

The hat that he’d been holding protectively against his head went flying out of sight; the wind whipped at his jacket, attempting to rip it from his body as he went tumbling through the air, and although he tried desperately to push against the earth’s pull and right himself, he could neither fly, nor leap, nor discern his position—and then he could, and he was upright again, no longer flailing in the air but halted somewhere partway over the bay. He could feel the hot drip of blood on his fingers cooling as the wind rushed over it, and he stuffed his hand back in his pocket and continued his path toward the ship.

To say he was panicking would be an understatement. The bark-like growth of his skin, which had until now been limited only to his right arm, still easily concealable underneath a sweater or a jacket, had spread to his hand before he’d had a chance to excuse himself with dignity. He’d heard the skin split, clear as day. Bruce must have heard it too. Whether he understood its meaning or not, he would have noticed the change in Clark’s demeanour, and Clark had been too startled to come up with a good reason for leaving without even saying goodbye.

He wished he had. It was likely the last time he would be able to see Bruce in person. He wouldn’t be able to conceal the changes that had overtaken his body for much longer.

Gravity kicked in again halfway over the city. This time Clark was low enough that he could avoid leaving a crater in a parking lot; he hit the ground running, sinking into the pavement before pushing off again, but he could feel the planet’s core pulling at him, keeping him from leaping more than a few meters at a time. It wasn’t the power of flight and he lacked his usual speed, but it was just enough to allow him to move swiftly in the shadows, shrinking away from the neon glow of fast-food restaurants and electronic billboards as he made his way toward Heroes Park.

Everything would be okay if he could just make it to the ship.

Clark stopped between two apartment buildings that bordered the park and glanced down at his hand. Without the wind wicking away the heat from his skin, his fingers felt like they had caught fire. The itching had returned with a fierceness, and although he’d managed to refrain from scratching at it, the skin had split open and left his fingers mangled and bloody, shedding flesh and blood like a gruesome five-headed snake. He pressed his back against one of the buildings and stopped to catch his breath, and in a desperate attempt to reaffirm that there was still something recognizable within he attempted to shift his gaze to a spectrum that would allow him to see the structures beneath this new growth. Did he still have bones? Had his body changed on the inside, too?

It seemed like he wasn’t meant to know the answer. His vision, normally as easy to change as it was to blink, stopped firmly at his skin. He could see the hair standing on end on his forearm, could see the strings of flesh stretching at his wrist as the hardened plates slowly and visibly pushed through his epidermis and shredded the remainder of his fingers. The buildings around him remained opaque, resistant to his superhuman vision. Only the sounds of the city filled his ears.

The ship was so close.

It took a surprising amount of effort for Clark to flex his fingers, but he managed to close them into a fist, his joints snapping with a noise like wood being split in two; it didn’t hurt him, not exactly, but he could see where the dark, syrupy blood had begun to seep out again.

He shoved his hand back in his coat pocket and took a deep, calming breath, then reached into his pocket. The phone Bruce had given him had somehow survived his brief tumble through the air, and as he held it to his ear with his remaining hand he realized that his fingers were shaking.

“Clark?”

“Barry? Hey. I—something’s come up,” Clark said. He swallowed, but his throat had gone dry in Gotham. “I can’t go with you to Kansas. You’re gonna need to get the suit for me and bring it here.”

“Oh,” Barry said. “Uh, sure, yeah, I can do that.”

“Thank you,” Clark whispered, slumping with relief against the stone wall of the apartment building. It would have been catastrophic if he hadn’t been able to get the suit tonight. It was likely going to be catastrophic even if he did. “And Barry? Make sure it stays folded up. Keep it in the bag exactly the way it is, okay?”

“Exactly as is,” Barry repeated dutifully. “Hey, man, are you sure—”

The line went dead as Clark tapped the red button. He slid the phone into the pocket that wasn’t filled with bits of flesh and blood and fragments of hardened skin.

The ship was so, so close.

“Let me get this straight. You lured me here under false pretenses to analyze a potted plant?”

“Technically, I brought you here to analyze Kryptonian technology,” Bruce said. “Which you have, but only in part.”

He placed the planter on the table before them and stepped back to allow Victor a closer look. He had not been suspicious of the planter’s contents prior to Clark’s abrupt departure, but now he handled it with the utmost care. The soil was scentless, or perhaps scented only like soil; the distinctly foul smell of nitric acid was notably absent, and it looked as though the dirt had been patted down somewhat.

“Clark said he planted a seed in this. I need you to tell me if that’s true, or if there’s something in this planter that I need to know about.”

Victor gazed at him, the suspicious expression that had been on his face since his arrival still radiating judgement in Bruce’s direction, but he stepped up to the work bench without comment. The blue light embedded in his forehead turned to a brilliant orange as he began to interface with the Kryptonian compendium that was currently open and active on the cave’s computer, and a reddish wave of light passed over the entirety of the planter as Victor began to scan it. “I thought you trusted Clark with these things.”

Bruce stood back and folded his arms over his chest as Victor finished his scan and reached toward the soil with one metallic thumb and forefinger. The alien metal reconfigured, distorting and dismantling Victor’s fingers reveal a long, thin set of needle-like digits that he slipped into the earth and, with the slow, cautious movement of a surgeon gripping shrapnel with forceps, Victor slowly began to pull the seed from the soil.

“Don’t think it’s poisonous,” he said, and held the seed pod up for Bruce to see. It was, as promised, not a seed that Bruce recognized from the group that had been planted in the garden; the pod was roughly the size of a gumball, smooth and almost perfectly circular, and it had a delicate green colour with shades of violet on one end. “At least, not the seed itself. Let me see if I can…”

The monitor behind Victor began to flicker, and the list that had filled the screen began to scroll at a dizzying pace. The red pupil of Victor’s mechanical eye darted back and forth, and all at once the saccadic movements ceased as a new light projection appeared on the work table before them: a man standing next to a plant of nearly equal height, with a long, smooth, trunk-like stem, a coil of thick vines at its base and a cluster of heavy-looking bulbs that came almost to the man’s shoulder. From the bulb cluster, a long, thin spike rose proudly into the air like a sabre.

“Huh,” Victor said faintly. “Nope, not poisonous at all. Looks like it’s just a regular old house plant.”

Bruce had seen house plants before, and he was certain that ‘house plant’ was the last combination of words that would have come to mind if he discovered this particular specimen in the wild. “You’re sure the databank says it’s not lethal?”

“Not unless the scout ship is lying to us, or unless Clark doctored the entry,” Victor said. The plant flickered and became a section of a grassy landscape, where Bruce could see a small patch of similarly-shaped stalks swaying gently in an unseen wind; occasionally, one of the vines would reach up cautiously and grasp at a nearby flower before slinking down into the grass. “Looks like it’s pretty harmless. According to that codex, or whatever he gave you, it doesn’t seem to have any nutritional value... no toxins or other defense systems…”

“What about that horn?” Bruce asked, indicating the long spine that grew from the plant’s bulbous head. “Is that supposed to be offensive?”

Seconds passed. Bruce’s screen had become a blur of data, and he couldn’t help but wonder whether Victor was actually looking at it or simply trying to make him nauseous. 

“Uh… I think it might be reproductive.”

The scene changed again, and this time Bruce watched as one of the plant’s long vines reached slowly for the stem of a nearby plant and, with the alarming precision of a sentient creature, pulled the stem closer and closer until the long spine on its head pierced the bud. 

Bruce stared at the image intently and wondered whether this was the image Clark had hoped for him to see.

“...I mean, according to these files, it’s not inherently dangerous. A little weird, maybe, but not something that would pose a threat to anyone, which means...” He slowly pressed the seed pod back into the soil, and the usual metal shape of his fingers reformed neatly when he withdrew his hand. “You’re just paranoid. That’s all there is to it.”

Bruce frowned at the planter.

Clark knew Bruce’s position on the Kryptonian flora existing outside the ship, and he must have known that Bruce wouldn’t have any interest in planting it in a garden of his own. He had to intend for Bruce to analyze it. He was trying to tell Bruce something, that much had been obvious… but if there was nothing unusual about the plant, it couldn’t have been the seed pod that Clark meant for Bruce to dissect.

That left the databank and the blood.

Victor tapped a finger on the table, then straightened up with a series of barely audible whirs and whines. “You know, I get that you’re concerned about these specimens getting out and wreaking havoc on the environment, but you really should trust Clark. He wouldn’t do anything that would endanger you. These things he gave you, they’re probably just his way of trying to be honest and open. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re not the best at communicating with people.”

It wasn’t as though Bruce could refute it. 

He sat back in his chair and gazed at the planter. If not the plant, then what?

“If I got you a sample of someone’s... genetic material... could you analyze it?”

Victor stopped where he stood. The suspicion slid over his face like a mask. “I might be able to. What do you have in mind?”

“Blood, I think. It’s in”—Bruce gestured in the direction of a small, clear refrigerated case—“there. Dated today.”

Victor approached the refrigerator and pulled out the Petri dish that contained Clark’s blood. Macabre a specimen though it was, Bruce found it fascinating; it was a dull burgundy, closer in hue to venous blood than arterial, but that was where the similarities between Clark’s blood and any other human’s blood stopped. Most notably, the sample hadn’t dried or clotted, nor had it left a skeleton ring on the wood when Bruce had swabbed it from his deck. It hadn’t done anything notable, like changing colour or moving independently as a sentient being, but it was certainly not human. In fact, he wasn’t even entirely sure it was blood.

“Whose blood is this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Bruce nodded at the dish and crossed his arms over his chest. “Just take a look at it. Tell me if anything seems strange about it.” 

Victor shot him a suspicious look and opened the dish and inserted his finger into it, then withdrew his hand and replaced the cover. A small protrusion on his fingertip had soaked up some of the blood like a test strip in a glucose meter, and before Victor could even open the refrigerator to replace the dish he suddenly stopped in his tracks and turned back to Bruce, his face set in a hard expression.

“You need to tell me where you got this.”

“I told you where I got it.”

“You told me you had Kryptonian _technology_. You didn’t say you had Kryptonian _blood_.

Bruce had begun to use the toe of his boot to rotate gently back and forth, but he stopped as Victor projected the image of a dozen moving DNA helixes into the empty space of the room.

“You want to tell me why you’re trying to analyze Clark’s DNA?”

“I think something is happening with him,” Bruce said curtly. “I need you to tell me if there’s anything out of the ordinary about its contents. Structure. Genetic makeup. Anything you can tell me, I need to know. Is there any chance you could detect something like an illness? Something that might have been caused by the plants, or by...”

“By what?”

Bruce shrugged. “You tell me.”

That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. Victor straightened up and glanced around the lab, then began to wander between the tables. He examined pieces of Bruce’s equipment, picking up a batarang here, a flash grenade there; it looked like he was contemplating his words carefully, and he turned his back on Bruce for a moment, lowering his head with a faint whir before straightening up and spinning around.

“All right,” he said, nodding slowly. He made direct eye contact with Bruce this time, and it was even more unnerving than if he’d simply refused to make eye contact altogether. “Okay. This whole situation is not cool. I cannot justify what you’re asking me to do here. How did you even get this blood, anyway? Can you answer that? Does he know you have it?”

“I didn’t hurt him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Victor scoffed. “Wow. You know, Clark actually said—no, forget it. If you want to know anything about Clark, you ask him, okay? I’m not your friendly extraterrestrial hacker who you can just call up to analyze the blood of someone who is supposed to be your friend. Clark gave you something from his own world—his own _dead world_ , Bruce, and you’re treating it like some kind of ticking bomb. You’re treating him like something less than human.”

Bruce grimaced, and Victor took a step back and shook his head. “Man, I thought you guys were… I thought you had some respect for him after everything that happened. You have no idea what he’s going through.”

“Do you?” Bruce asked, resting his arms on the table next to the planter. He hadn’t considered Victor’s ability to interface so easily with Kryptonian technology to be an issue prior to now, but he’d also never considered just why Victor was able to interact so easily with the ship. “Is there something you know that I don’t?”

Victor stared hard at him, then shrugged helplessly and began to walk backward toward the hallway at the end of the lab.

“I dunno, Batman,” he said. “I really don’t know. But I think you should drop the detective shit and use your head for once.”

He turned on his heel and strode down the hall and rounded the corner, and Bruce watched through the glass as Victor approached the elevator at the far end of the cave, stepped inside, and began to rise up and out of sight.

Victor’s speech intrigued and concerned Bruce in equal amounts. He was usually more level-headed than that; he’d never expressed such irritation at Bruce for being asked to assist with tasks that were beyond Bruce’s technological abilities and resources, but Bruce had never asked something so personal of him, either. Victor’s powers were a resource he’d expended, and with Diana so far away, Arthur still AWOL, and Barry as likely to share Bruce’s intent as he was to conceal it, it left only one option.

He would have to ask Clark himself.

Once the lights in the lake house had been dimmed for the night, Bruce carried the small planter into the living room and stood with it, scanning the room for an appropriate surface to rest it on. There was his desk, still covered in papers, and the kitchen table upon which it had previously rested; a single glass bowl sat in the centre of the table and after careful consideration Bruce relocated it to the already-cluttered coffee table near the fireplace before setting the planter carefully in its place. He filled a glass of water and poured it slowly over the spot where Victor had inserted the seed, then stood over the table and gazed down at the soil.

He recalled hearing at some point during his life that plants grew faster if spoken kindly to, though he couldn’t remember if someone had said this to him or if he’d overheard it in passing. He knew that some people could communicate with plants, though whether the reason they possessed that ability was due to a metahuman gene or genuine charisma, he wasn’t certain. In some cases, the former was the obvious explanation, but he’d never thought to attempt to disprove the latter.

He wet his lips, gazed down at the planter, and tried to imagine the seed pod gratefully wicking the moisture from the surrounding soil after a millennia-long dry spell; instead, he pictured Clark’s face, focusing on the soft smile that had crossed it as he’d gazed at Bruce days before, surrounded by lilac and lilies in the lawn and garden centre of a Home Depot Bruce would likely never visit again. 

“It’s going to be okay,” he said to the soil. “You can trust me.”

“I think Bruce knows something’s wrong.”

Clark lowered himself slowly into a liquid geo chair that was forming beneath him as quickly as he was sitting on it. He winced as he reached down to remove his shirt, and Victor, who had stood watching him, stepped closer and reached out to assist. The sap-like substance had dried and hardened like concrete on his shirt, and he was certain that the fabric would tear before he could successfully remove it.

“Was it the fact that he called me to analyze the plant you gave him that tipped you off? Or was it the part where he kept your blood and tried to get me to analyze it, too?”

Clark’s laugh turned into a cough. His throat was so dry that he’d been hoarse for most of the evening, and no amount of water seemed to help. “No, it’s… I just think he knows. After the way I left at the lake, he had to suspect something, but… I don’t know. It’s like he’s always walking on eggshells around me. Like he’s trying to convince me I can trust him but he’s waiting for me to slip up.”

The fabric of his shirt tore, and Clark winced as he looked at his arm. The bark encapsulated almost his entire forearm now, ripping his flesh like popcorn bursting from its shell every time he dared to move. It had spread over almost the entirety of his back, chewing up untouched flesh and causing a fresh cascade of blood-like sap, or sap-like blood, to soak into his clothing. The botanical nature of his transformation had become glaringly apparent in the past days, as the protrusions on his scalp had opened to reveal long, broad leaves and the skin had hardened and thickened into a bark-like crust, but Clark could no longer find it in himself to laugh at the irony of his situation. At any moment, it felt like a tree branch would emerge from his rib cage; he could imagine how leaf buds would push through his skin and unfurl along his back, how roots would begin to emerge from his feet, gnarled and eager to sink into the ground. 

Geotaxis. Bruce would have been delighted to know that he had, in attempting to apologize with a convoluted metaphor, predicted exactly how Clark’s deterioration would progress.

“I think he is,” Victor admitted, “but I don’t know if it’s exactly how you think. He still wants to trust you, but he’s… listen, we had this conversation already. I think he’s suspicious of _everybody_ , but I don’t think he wants to believe that you’d do something dangerous on purpose.”

He lifted his hand and his palm unfolded, many small metallic plates shifting and rotating aside until something emerged from the centre: a small, transparent capsule filled with the same blackened material that was still visible on the skinsuit that sat crumpled and forgotten in the garden, surrounded by the thick stalks and spiked grass that had finally begun to give the Genesis Garden some colour. In the red light, mostly everything looked black, but Clark knew that the garden, slow to bloom though it was, would be spectacular.

“Anyway, here’s what I managed to get from the hole, and this”—a third arm unfolded from his torso, much less like a human arm and more like an assembly line robot’s nimble extremity, and displayed a sphere approximately a third the size of a golf ball—“is the only explosive I managed to grab while he wasn’t looking. I think I can engineer the bomb to do what we need it to do, but do you think this will be enough?”

“I hope so,” Clark said quietly. He’d have to thank Barry later, if he could still contact him. It was a cryptic task that he’d asked of him—retrieve his suit from Kansas, deliver it to Metropolis, no staying to ask questions, payment delivered in the form of a month’s supply of free pizza—and he still felt bad about being unable to go with him, but Barry was too smart, too quick to notice details like that up close. He would ask questions if Clark insisted on staying on the ground, and he would notice if Clark lagged behind.

Clark didn’t want to think about how Barry would have reacted if his hat had fallen off.

“Well, on that note, let’s hope this does the job.”

As he spoke, Victor carried the seed to the tool shed where he had been working on creating a capsule that would respond to the electrical signals passed through the roots of the surrounding plants. It had been his idea to use the neuron-like root system to signal the surrounding flora, but Clark had asked him to keep the rest of the details intentionally vague. It didn’t matter precisely what he was doing; all Clark needed to know was that it was delicate work, and that it stood a chance of doing what he needed it to do.

“You wanna do the honours?”

Clark held up his hand in the universal sign for ‘go ahead’, then watched as Victor made his way toward the centre of the garden, searching through the esrove saplings and the crabedil grasses for something unseen. “Do you think he’ll think less of me when he finds out what we’ve been doing?”

“I think he’ll be hurt that we didn’t tell him, but I don’t think he’ll think less of you. You’re like…” He paused, then returned to the bare patch of earth where the three main trails met at the base of the walkway. “You’re important to him, Clark.”

Clark didn’t know precisely what that meant, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask. It would be far easier to keep Bruce in the dark about this sort of thing knowing that he never had any expectations for Clark to begin with. It was going to be hard to disappoint someone who had poured so much effort into trying to make Clark feel comfortable in the world again.

lark took a deep breath and felt the bark pull against his skin, not painful but not entirely comfortable. He hoped that when it became hard to breathe, he would remember that he could simply stop. “On a positive note, there’s less of me left each day. By the time he figures out what we’re doing, there might not even be anything left of me to know or understand the concept of...”

He wasn’t sure what to add. He wasn’t sure where he wanted that sentence to go, or whether he hoped for it to be true or not.

“I thought the same thing was gonna happen to me, you know,” Victor said without looking up. “Figured I was becoming more machine every day… thought that eventually, there wasn’t gonna be anything left of me, either. Now? I’m just fine.” 

Clark remembered the video Bruce had shown him. Victor had still had most of his torso and an arm prior to the Mother Box’s intervention. Now the only thing visibly human about him was his face, but it was hard to think of Victor as anything other than a person.

“You know this won’t end like that.”

“I know. I just don’t want you to be afraid when it happens.”

At last, Victor climbed to his feet and made his way back to the shed, followed by a ‘bot that held a number of Kryptonian instruments in a number of tentacles. At least he’d managed to befriend the ship and its attendants; it made Clark feel better about ignoring it for so long, and he found it comforting to know that the robots were as invested in keeping the garden alive as he was.

It took a great amount of effort for Clark to stand. He could feel the bark tugging at his back, warning him against further movement, and as he stepped into the garden he could feel a familiar sensation beginning to prickle against the soles of his feet; he could glean from touch alone that the nitric acid wasn’t doing enough to nourish the plants adequately, and the fertilizer had had approximately the same effect on the flowers that a bullet would have on Clark’s chest, but he was in no condition to maintain the garden now. It had taken only hours for his arm to grow numb, and all he could do with it now was cradle it protectively against his chest. 

“Is it done?” he asked, gazing down at the ground. In the bare patch of earth, surrounded by angular metal footprints, he could just barely make out a small mound of dark, recently-overturned soil.

“Yeah,” Victor called back. “You should get some rest. I’m gonna try to make this into something we can use.”

Clark gazed down at the dirt. Rest wouldn’t come easily to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through the night, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept without clawing his way out of the soil and into the sun.

He took another moment to admire the garden; undernourished though it was, and monochrome though it appeared in the red spectrum light, the garden had still grown enough to cause a surge of pride to swell within his chest. Shoots had begun to unfurl and leaves had begun to reach out from surging stalks. Flower heads sat low to the ground, only just beginning to reveal serrated leaves and dark centres.

 _Everything Kryptonian grows eternal_ , Clark thought. Safe and sheltered, his plants would flourish. If Clark couldn’t make sure of it, the ship would. 

It was the garden’s turn to tell his story.

All but one of Bruce’s monitors were filled with flowers.

The databank that the ship had provided Clark with was extensive and, thanks to Victor’s help, had been fully translated into a format that his system could comprehend; it contained more information than Bruce had ever expected to have on anything Kryptonian, complete with details about each plant’s history, its use in society, its physiology, and more. There were trees and shrubs and flowers of all shapes and sizes on the screens that Bruce could never have imagined into existence, and there were some species that looked familiar to him, too, plants with leaves and petals and long, thin stems, sturdy trunks, tangled networks of roots. He’d combed through dozens of them following Victor’s departure, had sent texts and photographs and questions upon questions to Clark, and—

no reply.

It was going on two days of radio silence now. Two days wasn’t a particularly long period of time for Bruce to go without hearing from anyone, but given that he and Clark had been in near-constant contact for the past few weeks, it seemed strange to him that Clark would leave him with such personal items—gifts—and then cease all correspondence spontaneously. Bruce had even dropped by Heroes Park the night before, but within the silence of the facility the ship had been unmoving and dark, with no signs of life within.

_Clark?_

There was a photo from the garden that day in the group chat, but Bruce’s message went unanswered.

_? ? ? ?_

There had been many moments in which Bruce had wondered, as he gazed at the small bulb that had begun to push its way out of the planter, whether Clark had been truthful in his reasoning for presenting Bruce with the plant and the compendium of flora. He was convinced of some hidden meaning behind Clark’s gesture, and still was not convinced that Clark had not hidden something within that compendium, some truth or confession buried in pages of Kryptonian text. The flower must have had some long-lost social implications, or some ancient medicinal use, or a place among Kryptonian fairy-tales and stories. Or maybe it had none of those, and these things had been gifted to him for a different reason.

All he knew was that it would continue to elude him. He was going to need a second opinion.

“I called this meeting to talk about Clark,” Bruce said at last. Only one of his monitors was currently free of Kryptonian flora, and it was the one that currently had Barry, Diana, and Victor connected to it. Arthur, unsurprisingly, had not answered the call.

“This is a weird way to hold a group meeting,” Barry said. “And a weird place to have a group meeting about Clark when he’s already in the group chat.”

“He’s not on this channel, and I’m holding it this way because it’s the easiest way to speak to everyone at the same time without calling you all here,” Bruce said smoothly. “Until the manor’s renovations are finished, we don’t have anywhere suitable to convene, so we do it here. Has anyone heard from Arthur?”

“I haven’t heard from him, but I can tell you where his phone is,” Victor said.

“Let me guess. Thirty thousand leagues under the sea?”

“Something like that.”

Bruce folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. He’d suspected as much. Whatever Arthur was doing, he hoped it had something to do with that underwater surge that had covered the world’s coastal cities in trash, submarines, and more things the general public preferred to leave forgotten in the ocean.

“We’ll leave the channel open in case he decides to join us. But I didn’t call this meeting to catch a fish. I want to know who spoke to Clark last. Or—recently. Have any of you heard from him recently? The last few days, the last week?”

Barry made high-pitched, thoughtful noise. “I got his suit for him and dropped it off in Metropolis, like, two days ago, but after that, I just kinda thought he was… you know, hanging out in his garden alone. Which is _sort_ of weird, I will admit, but I hear once you start a grow op, you never really leave.” 

“Okay,” Bruce said, “so you saw him two days ago. Anyone else? A text, a visual, anything?”

Diana cleared her throat. “You know that I saw him when I was in Metropolis three weeks ago, but most recently… maybe a couple of days ago, too? He sent me a message asking me about the myth of the hyacinth, but nothing seemed unusual about his behaviour.” 

A couple of days ago. That could have been before he came to Gotham, or after.

“When, Diana? What did he say specifically? Why didn’t you let anyone else know?”

“It was… oh, two days ago, on Thursday afternoon. It would have been early in the morning here. He said that he had been thinking about the story I told him and he wanted to know more about the story of the hyacinth. I didn’t think there was anything strange about his question at the time,” Diana said.

“So he wanted to know a story about a flower?” Barry asked.

“No,” Victor said, “he wanted to know a story about a man. Right?”

“That’s right. In Greek mythology, the man who was known as Hyacinthus was a divine hero, a Spartan prince. According to the legends that were told, he was a lover of the god Apollo. Not a follower, but a… partner.”

A lover of the Greek god of the sun. Ironically, a Greek god of truth. Bruce had brushed up on his Greek mythology shortly after meeting Diana for the first time, but there were still gaps in those stories that he’d been meaning to ask her about. As far as he knew, Clark had always rejected the notion of himself as any sort of legendary or divine figure. What about the story had caught his interest? 

“So he was curious about… what? The hero named after a flower? The flower named after a hero?”

“No, he wanted me to repeat the story that I had told him in Metropolis,” Diana said. Her voice had taken on a quality that Bruce knew to mean waning patience. “Hyacinthus was a man who was wounded by Apollo in a tragic accident, and despite Apollo’s best efforts to save him, he perished in Apollo’s arms. According to this myth, it was from Hyacinthus’ blood that a flower was created. The most beautiful of all flowers, according to the Greeks, inscribed with a symbol that represented sorrow.”

Bruce blinked at his screen as a half-dozen images of deep blue-purple flowers bloomed on his screen. Victor’s doing, most likely. “Yeah, it looks like the Greeks really bought into the death and rebirth stuff. The Spartans held festivals of mourning and celebration… sounds pretty standard for a Greek myth. Do you seriously think Clark was looking to take inspiration from it, though?”

“It would be pretty metal if he did,” Barry said. He laughed once, but Victor didn’t seem quite as amused.

“Bruce, you’re the detective here. What do you think about it?”

Bruce took a slow breath. Death, rebirth, flowers, blood—it seemed a little on the nose, even for Clark. He’d always thought himself a decent judge of character, but he had been wrong about Clark before. It wasn’t unthinkable that he could be wrong again. “I thought we agreed that he doesn’t think of himself as a god, so… would he see some connection between himself and Apollo? Some connection between himself and the sun?”

“What if he sees himself as Hyacinthus in this scenario?” Barry asked. “I mean, the death and flowers obsession. It’s probably safe to call it an obsession at this point, right? And like, giving a big middle finger to death is kind of his thing right now.”

Clark as Hyacinthus would be no stretch of the imagination. He already lived as a deity in the minds of so many, though Bruce was certain that Clark would prefer to remain as far from god comparisons as humanly possible. Then again, if Clark _did_ consider himself to be the beautiful symbol of sorrow born from a tragic death, which among them would he consider to be Apollo?

Diana made a hesitant sound. “I don’t think he perceives himself as Hyacinthus. I don’t think he knows how to perceive this version of himself. I think he has more questions than answers about his death and his current state, and I think his _obsession_ , if you will, is as much about his existence as it is a Greek hero.”

There was a brief pause, and Barry said, “Or… the other option, which is that he… _does_ see himself as one of these people, in which case…”

“How does the myth end?” Bruce asked.

“They created a sanctuary, a temple at the site of his burial—”

“Holy shit,” Barry interrupted. “He got resurrected, grew a beard, and became immortal.”

“That isn’t precisely what—”

“I’m just reading Wikipedia, Diana, that’s what it says,” Barry said quickly. She said something in return, something that sounded like it might be the sort of thing Diana would say as someone who had probably been alive at the time this myth took place, but Bruce had already tuned out the banter; he gazed at the myriad of monitors and the hundreds of seed specimens that were currently on display and frowned.

He’d told Clark that he was growing flowers instead of monsters. It had been an offhand comment, barely important enough to dwell on, but Bruce thought suddenly of the way Clark’s face had gone stony at the lake as he gazed at the sky, and he thought of the dark blood that he had found on the deck. 

If Clark could be believed, if all was truly well, he had no reason to leave in such a hurry. Superman business would be the most likely excuse, but he hadn’t mentioned any of Superman’s favourite verbs—save, intervene, help, prevent—and it had been weeks since Superman had done anything public.

But even if Clark could be believed, and even if his unusual behaviour, his fidgeting, his shoddy excuses, and his unexplained absence had not raised any red flags in Bruce’s mind? Clark should not have been bleeding. 

Not unless he had done it to himself… or unless something Kryptonian had made him.

He had kept his hands in his pocket for nearly the entire duration of his visit to the lake house, and Bruce could remember so clearly how Luthor’s hand, too, had bled. He had spent so much time unsupervised in the Genesis Chamber, and Clark had hardly left it for weeks now, too.

“He’s growing flowers instead of monsters,” Bruce breathed. Diana and Barry and Victor’s voices, still debating the specifics of Greek mythology and the difference between the hyacinth of legend and the hyacinth of modern day, all fell quiet.

“Wait,” Barry said. “He’s… what _exactly_ does that mean?”

Clark opened his eyes and saw only dark.

The earth was all around him. He could feel it, taste it, smell it. It invaded his senses, dulling them to the world beyond his grave… and yet he found himself tolerating it, comfortable with it, yearning for an eternity of silence spent within it. He rejoiced in the sounds of the soil, the sound of dirt being pushed aside, insects burrowing tunnels and root systems scraping slowly through the loam.

The rain began. A whisper, a hiss, a roar, and Clark could hear it pattering in the distance, sluicing off of the leaves and hitting the ground with a thousand echoing thuds. Its moisture sank into him, chilling his body, and turned the surrounding soil sour with the stench of death and rot.

No, not death. He wasn’t dead. This was a dream and nothing more, a dream where he was alive, buried deep in the heart of Kansas where no sunlight could reach him.

He pictured lifting his hand, and then he did. It was difficult to displace the earth, but if a worm could do it, so could he—and so he did, pushing with the last of his strength toward the roar of the rain, the whisper of the grass and leaves above, with his fingers outstretched, and at last he pushed beyond the earth’s surface, into the warm, humid air of—

He opened his eyes. The dirt was beneath his fingers, and he realized that he was not sure how long he had been kneeling in the garden; though the transformation of his hand had dulled his nerves and negated his ability to feel, he could feel the small shoots that had begun to grow from his knuckles and the back of his hand, and small, inflorescent buds were barely beginning to develop and open along the length of his forearm. He could feel the change in his shoulder, too, and as he shifted and pushed himself to his feet he heard a snap from his knee; it staggered him, and soon his pants were soaked with the same thick blood-sap as he realized that something in his leg had shattered beneath his weight.

But it didn’t startle him. He was so eager for it to be over.

Walking was a difficult task, and it sapped Clark’s energy to even climb the walkway and make it to the door. Even his most concentrated efforts to lift his feet off the ground were met with an unforgiving resistance; his body no longer seemed keen to obey him, and all he could do was shuffle through the ship one step at a time, oozing blood and ichor along the way. 

As the doors opened and allowed the harsh blue light from the hallway to wash over him, Clark raised his arm to shield his eyes and felt his shirt catch on the bark. The fabric tore, and Clark could think only of the chamber containing the house of El’s many undersuits; if he could dress himself in one of those, it might contain his shifting physical form, even if for a short while. The suit could withstand the acid bath easily. He was not so sure about the bomb that Victor had left.

Victor.

He’d nearly forgotten.

Clark continued down the hallway. The grass rustled anxiously as he limped along, dragging one foot in front of the other. “Ship… the garden light. Out here.”

The ship hummed, detached and dispassionate. “Where would you like to alter the light source?”

His mouth was so dry he could barely speak. “Everywhere.”

All at once the ship went dark, and when he opened his eyes again the atmosphere had become wholly different; the sedges lining the hallway quivered faintly as Clark passed by, their blades whispering together even in the absence of a breeze. He ran his fingers over them, and in the absence of his usual tactile sense, he could feel something overwhelmingly familiar: the same sensation he’d felt bloom in his chest when he looked at Lois, or his mother, a warmth that spread through his lungs and into his arms and legs, reminding him of moments of gratitude, of safety, of being loved. It reminded him of Bruce, standing next to the moving van with his hands in his pockets, gazing at him between rows of hanging baskets and potted flowers—

and then he was in the armoury, standing before a pod that rotated open to reveal a skinsuit. The deep, rich blue of the fabric was black in the new light spectrum, the cape a brilliant red, hanging motionless in the still air of the pod. With his teeth gritted, Clark snapped a twig that had begun to grow from his elbow like a second arm, then returned his gaze to the suit. If all went well, whoever found him here in the ship would recognize the crest and cape, even if they couldn’t identify his face. 

“The bomb,” Clark breathed. “Where did Victor put it?”

“The nutrient delivery device created by Victor Stone is currently located on your right,” the ship replied, and when Clark looked to his right he saw the same robot that had followed Victor through the garden. 

He couldn’t help but smile. Victor had done his job, and done it well. The ship was silent, and all Clark needed to do was find his way back to the garden, where he could surround himself with the love and warmth of the life he’d brought into the world until… 

until.

“Contact Victor. Tell him… I’m going in.”

The ship gave a breezy affirmation as Clark reached for the suit, and suddenly it was no longer the suit he was reaching for, but the door to the Genesis garden. The suit was already on, stretched taut over the thick plates that grew from his body. There was a whisper around him that might have been his cape dragging on the floor, or the gentle rustling of leaves in the room; he could feel even through his boots the familiar itch in his feet, in his shattered knee, his nearly-immobile arm. The sedges were wary, he knew, but the occupants of the garden welcomed him as he trudged into the dirt and felt, for only the second time in his career as Superman, the unpierceable fabric of the Kryptonian skinsuit beginning to tear.

Clark had expected that it would be the loneliest thing in the world, waiting to be found in the solitude of this garden. In the dreams he had felt so alone in the dirt, forgotten and abandoned. Now, in the waking world, he was surrounded by friends. Friends who would come looking. Friends who would support him, strengthen him. Friends from his world and from this one.

He thought of Bruce, the warmth of his hands curling Clark’s fingers around the phone that was now wedged in the immobile structure of his hand, and he did not feel alone at all.

It took Bruce less than five minutes to fly the Batwing into downtown Metropolis. He dropped into a dive from the ship and hurtled toward the ground, leaving the ship to return to Gotham on autopilot while he slipped easily through the hole in the old Homeland Security compound. He circled toward the ship’s cargo bay and, too impatient to slow his descent, tucked into a roll and landed on his feet in front of a door that was already opening.

Alarm sirens rang in Bruce’s head. He had never been able to open the ship on his own, which meant that Clark had known he was coming and had opened the ship for him—at least, he assumed so, until Victor dropped onto the cement next to him with a muted metallic thud, and he saw that the light on his forehead was fading back to blue.

“Barry should be here in—”

“Yep, hi, sorry,” Barry said. Bruce had to turn his head to avoid being blasted with the dust storm that had been whipped up in his wake. “Are we, uh… is this everyone?”

“Diana’s on her way,” Victor said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but she’ll be here.”

“And Arthur?” Bruce asked.

Victor simply shook his head.

Bruce sighed through his nose. They were two incredibly powerful beings short of a team—three, counting Clark, but while this mission appeared to be one that was taking place around Clark and not alongside him, Bruce would hesitate to place him among their ranks. He did not know what they would find inside the ship, but it seemed that Clark did not want to keep them out this time.

“Stay close,” Bruce said. “Victor, can you find a way to disable the security ‘bots?”

“They won’t be a problem,” Victor said, then glanced at Barry. “I don’t know what we’re going to find in there, but if I were you guys, I’d put on a mask. “

As he spoke, a series of plates unfolded from the back of his head and enclosed his face, creating a multifaceted helmet of pure Apokoliptian metal. A single red eye glowed from within, and he raised a hand and said, “Follow me.”

They stepped into the dark interior of the ship, Victor and then Bruce and then Barry, and the first thing that Bruce noted was the light. The halls had been filled with a cool blue before, one that had accentuated the alien nature of the ship’s unadorned, curvilinear hallways and arciform architecture, but now the halls that led left and right were filled with the same red light from the garden. Down the corridor that led to the garden, the grassy sedges had grown thick in the simulated Kryptonian atmosphere; the blades stretched out several feet, drooping from the planters and nearly reaching the carved floor underfoot. The ship was warm on the inside, more humid than even the summer air outside, but Bruce felt a chill run through his body. 

“Clark?”

His voice echoed faintly through the hallway. The grass rustled softly, and the ship responded without acknowledging his call: “Attention: five minutes remaining until irrigation cycle.”

Victor glanced back. His expression through the helmet was unreadable. He looked, for the first time in Bruce’s memory, as alien as anything in the ship.

“Stop the irrigation cycle,” Bruce said.

“I’m sorry, I do not recognize your command.”

“Cease the irrigation cycle. Pause it.”

“Special authorization is required to pause the irrigation cycle,” the ship said.

Bruce gritted his teeth. If Clark was in the garden, the nitric acid bath wouldn’t affect him, but it would prevent anyone else from entering safely. Victor might be able to enter, and Barry might be able to move quickly enough to avoid the majority of the acid, but Bruce did not have any treatment with him for acid burns, and he couldn’t take the risk of sending Barry in until the acid had settled.

When the Genesis Chamber’s opaque door became visible in the distance, Bruce reached for his belt. He had a mouthpiece that, while not entirely acid-resistant, would at least keep him from inhaling any dangerous fumes and would protect the exposed lower portion of his face. Protective lenses clicked into place in the cowl, and he stepped ahead of Victor as, around the curved corner, someone walked into view:

Not Clark, but Diana.

And Arthur.

“Oh, thank god,” Barry said, sagging with relief. “We literally thought you were dead. Not you, Diana—Wonder Woman, sorry, we’re in public—but, uh—wow, that is a new suit, did you—is your hair different…?”

“Good to see you again, Arthur,” Bruce said, then addressed Diana. “Thanks for coming. We’re still looking for Clark. Did you happen to find anything unusual?”

“Nothing that seemed suspicious,” Diana said. 

“Yeah, no sign of anything where we came in. Doesn’t look like there was a fight. Ship’s pretty damn empty, except for…” Behind Diana, Arthur had his fingers curled around an elegant trident that gleamed red in the light, and he prodded at the grass lining the ship’s wall. “What happened here, anyway? New ideas about home decor?”

“Did you even look at the phone I gave you?”

“Oh, that thing? Yeah, I left it at the bottom of the ocean. Doesn’t work in Atlantis for some weird reason. Just kinda crumpled up on me.” He chuckled and twirled the trident, then looked at the door that they had congregated before. “So… we need to get in there? Is this a forced entry situation?”

“We’re not sure.” As hard as Bruce tried to maintain his focus, his thoughts continued to slip back to Clark at the lake, turning anxiously as he tried not to think of what might have happened in the days since he had last seen him, bleeding and panicked.

He was not sure what they would find in the garden. Part of him really did not want to know.

“Whatever we find in there,” Bruce said slowly, addressing the entire team at last, “be on your guard. We don’t have much time before the irrigation cycle starts, and you don’t want to be stuck inside when the acid starts to rain down.”

“Acid rain,” Arthur said under his breath. “Badass.”

Bruce turned back to the door, and knew it was not the humidity that had caused sweat to begin to prickle his skin inside the suit. “Ship, reveal the chamber.”

To his surprise, the interlocking plates of the door began to shimmer and became translucent, then entirely clear. Red light filled the entirety of the Genesis Chamber, emanating from some unseen source; the crimson surface of the small pond was entirely still, but there was one thing that Bruce could detect movement from in the garden: the dark, distinctive figure of Clark, who stood at the forefront of the garden where the dirt paths joined, his cape a pool of fabric that covered the flora surrounding his feet.

Long, blade-like shapes stretched up behind his head, giving it a jagged appearance against the dark undergrowth of the garden. His legs and arms were thicker, bulging not with the smooth curvature of muscle but with a growth that Bruce could not quite make out from this distance. The crest that covered his chest had been partially obscured.

And his face—

The door slid open. A blast of hot, humid air washed over them, bringing a subtle earthy scent with it and rustling the grass in the hall.

“Wait a second,” Victor said quietly. He stepped forward and held an arm in front of Bruce, glancing at him with that single red eye. “You can’t go in yet, the irrigation—”

“Clark,” Bruce whispered. The sound of the grass became the roar of blood in his ears, and he took a step forward and hit the immovable barrier of Victor’s arm. “Is he…”

“Bruce, I’m telling you you cannot go in there, he—”

“Go.”

The word filled the garden like the rumbling of thunder. It was not the ship’s voice, but it seemed to come from all around them, echoing through the chamber and the hallways. Bruce stopped in the doorway, gazing down at the distorted version of Clark that stood in the garden, and heard a single, sharp crack before the chamber erupted with white light.

“Now commencing irrigation.”

The searing heat that had filled the air immediately following the explosion ceased almost immediately, and Bruce found himself being pushed backward. It was Victor, he realized quickly, who was pushing him and the others away from the chamber door, and as the first faint traces of the acid’s acrid scent began to waft into the hallway, the door slid shut and left Bruce, Victor, Barry, Diana, and Arthur in complete silence.

Rather, close to it. A section of the sedge opposite the door had caught fire and was beginning to crackle and blacken, but Bruce watched as Victor calmly aimed his palm at the planter and sprayed the sedge with a suppressant and extinguished the flames. His other arm was no longer an arm, but ended in a great curved shape with a convex surface that still glowed white-hot.  
“I told you not to go in,” he said quietly.

Out of the corner of Bruce’s eye, Barry sat unceremoniously on the floor.

“Did Clark just…?”

“Set off a bomb?” Arthur finished. He was watching the door with a wary expression, but it appeared that Victor’s shield had kept him from being singed by the explosion. “We all saw that happen, right? That was him? And he just set everything on fire?”

“We don’t know yet what happened,” Diana said. “That may not have been Clark. Whatever that explosion was, it was not Kryptonian.” She was clearly trying to keep the calm, but worry was etched into her features, and she chewed her lip briefly as Barry and Arthur both turned to her.

Bruce had no doubt that she knew what the blast was. She would have seen it long ago, this instrument of war crimes.

“White phosphorus,” Bruce said.

“White phosphorus?” Barry looked at them from the floor, and his expression suggested that the name rang a bell for him, too. “Why would he need white phosphorus?”

“To kill every living thing in that room,” Bruce said grimly. They were lucky that none of the smoke had escaped, and luckier that Victor had reacted so quickly. It was as if he’d known what to expect, but Bruce had greater concerns than why Victor had warned them to cover up. Whatever hand Victor had in this was unimportant compared to the question of what Clark had done.

“Or,” Victor said, his face emerging at last from the metal helmet, “to grow them.”

It took ten minutes for the irrigation cycle to complete.

Victor, as it turned out, had intimate knowledge of the acid-water cycle and how long it would take to complete. Bruce had many questions for him, including precisely how he knew to shield them from a phosphorus grenade, how he knew that the ship would filter out the smoke and ensure that there was no residue from either substance that would pose a threat to any member of the group, or how he knew that Clark had intended to use an incendiary substance as a growth catalyst, but he was more concerned about finding Clark safe and alive than he was about interrogating Victor in the middle of the scout ship.

“Are you absolutely certain it was Clark standing in that garden?” Alfred asked in Bruce’s ear. He, unlike Bruce, had the benefit of being able to review the footage that had been captured by the lenses. “It’s quite difficult to see what exactly is standing in that room. It looks like it might be some sort of… humanoid tree.”

“It’s Clark,” Bruce said. He had taken to pacing the hallway, though he never let the chamber door leave his sight. “It wasn’t some tree dressed up in a skinsuit and cape.”

“Then if it was Clark, he would have survived,” Alfred replied.

“You didn’t see him,” Bruce insisted, then swallowed. The last thing he wanted to do was suggest that Clark had somehow become weaker, that he wouldn’t have survived an explosion of that magnitude, but there had simply been something not right about Clark’s body. Maybe it was what had brought him to Bruce’s home. Maybe he had wanted to tell Bruce about it and panicked. 

Maybe he had wanted to say goodbye.

He was in the process of pacing back toward the chamber when the doors hissed open at last. Barry was on his feet in a crackle of blue energy while Arthur and Diana lifted their respective weapons and exchanged cautious glances, but instead of looking at the chamber Victor watched Bruce.

“Bruce, whatever happens in there…”

Bruce strode past him and entered the chamber without waiting for him to finish.

The plants inside the garden had grown. It was the first thing that he saw, and then it was all that he saw; the pond on the left was obscured by leafy fronds that stretched high into the air, and the tool shed on the right was barely visible through a jungle of spiked grass and bliyeafs that looked to be half Bruce’s height. Dark, bloated shapes lined the dirt path to the left, boasting tall, fin-like petals that waved gently in a breeze that Bruce could not feel.

And in front of them, a dozen feet from the spot where the gentle slope of the walkway met the garden, stood Clark.

In the time it had taken the irrigation cycle to complete, the distinctive outline of Superman had changed. The blade-like shapes that extended from his head created a collar and crown of what Bruce recognized at leaves, and the entirety of his right arm had grown over with a heavy layer of crust that grew jaggedly at the spots that would normally be an elbow, a wrist, a hand, as if it had been broken and reformed many times over; his left arm had grown distorted, gnarled, his fingers thickened and elongated and twisted like roots, pointed toward the bare earth where Bruce stood. The blue fabric of the Kryptonian suit was black in the red sunlight, tattered and barely visible in most places, and where skin should have been visible along the stretch between Clark’s shoulder and neck a vibrant cluster of foliage grew instead, crawling up the side of his neck and throat and obscuring part of his jaw; from the back of his head and scalp grew more broad leaves that swept gracefully back over his shoulders like scaled armour that transitioned gently into a cluster of tightly-coiled flowers that seemed to be growing directly from his opposite shoulder. 

A small service robot whirred around his feet, which looked as if they too had been stretched like putty and twisted into a dark network of horrid shapes that pierced the soil and disappeared beneath the ground.

“We’re too late,” Arthur said. There was a shakiness in his voice that Bruce had not expected to hear, followed by the heavy thud of the trident on the walkway. “We’re too goddamn late.”

Even now, the thing before them was changing; something thin and dark pierced the golden crest and began to inch its way out of Clark’s chest, followed by smaller tendrils that covered the crest like webbing. Smaller, darker flowers with serrated petals had begun to grow and bloom on the root-like tangle of his hand, and suddenly all Bruce could remember was the utter helplessness of gazing at Clark’s chest after it had been cracked open in Gotham, left steaming and blackened and utterly irreversible.

“What the fuck is that,” Barry hissed from behind Bruce. “Is his chest about to… you know?”

“Stop,” Bruce snapped. He took a step forward into the soil, and once he was satisfied that it was not going to melt the soles of his boots, took another step toward Clark. “We don’t know what’s happening. I want you all to stay back until—”

“Out… of… time.”

That same voice that had ordered them away before filled the chamber; the surrounding flora seemed to shiver at the sound, and Bruce knew that it was Clark’s voice, warped and different, unimaginably different. A fine moss crawled over the bark that covered his shoulder and tiny shoots had begun to unfurl along his forearm.

And in his hand, a glimmer of metal, a cracked screen. A phone.

“Clark,” he whispered.

There was nothing recognizable about him. Soft, leafy growth pulsed up the side of his face. One eye was obscured by a thick vine. His mouth was no longer visible. Had Bruce been able to sense the direction of Clark’s gaze, he would have guessed that it was aimed at him.  
He removed a gauntlet and lifted his hand. He brushed his fingers over the velvety flowers obscuring Clark’s face, small clustered monocots with light petals, and slid his fingers through the foliage. There was a solid structure beneath but no movement between the small stalks, no warmth to indicate life, no soft skin of his cheek, no stubble. No Clark.

He closed his eyes and inhaled the sweet, gentle scent of the flowers, and Clark breathed with him; his breath hissed out in a long sigh, causing the small petals and leaves on his face to ripple with life before all fell still once more.

A horror gripped Bruce’s heart and pierced it like a horrid, thorny vine.

“What did this?” he asked softly. He turned and looked at Victor, who had stepped into the garden and but lingered further back with the rest of the group, and tried to ignore the dismayed expressions on the faces of his colleagues. “What did we miss?”

Victor, too, looked distinctly sorrowful, and he looked down at the ground for a moment before meeting Bruce’s gaze. “Nothing. It was right there in front of us the whole time. The Mother Box, the change engine… when we used it, it changed him. That’s what it is. That’s what it does.”

Bruce closed his eyes.

He’d failed Clark again. He’d promised him so much, had tried so hard to help him, to make him feel like he wasn’t alone… and in the end, he had been. He had allowed Clark to isolate himself—hell, he’d _commanded_ it—and Clark had suffered in silence.

And now he was gone.

“Attention: commencing secondary water irrigation,” the ship said. Bruce had little time to react to the shower that seemed to erupt from thin air, but it carried no foul scent with it; he could hear the raindrops beating against the leaves and stalks, a monotonous sound that filled the quiet that no member of the group seemed keen to break—then Bruce heard a small sound, a strange, muted pop, and he opened his eyes to see Barry pointing upward at something behind him.

Long, black stalks had continued to grow from Clark’s back. They reached toward the arched ceiling of the chamber with dark, bulbous tips, bobbing occasionally under the force of the rain, and Bruce saw one burst open with the same small popping sound, releasing a cloud of spores against the backlit amniotic tank that slowly began to drift downward around them.

Maybe Clark had been truthful about his intentions with the garden. Maybe he had planned to keep whatever plants he’d been growing contained within this space, and perhaps he’d had containment procedures put in place to ensure that no seeds or spores ever found their way outside the ship.

Maybe he’d never expected that he would need to contain himself.

“We need to go,” Bruce said quietly. He slipped the air filter over his mouth again and turned back to the group. “We need to get the ship to seal all entrances and exits, including this chamber. Until we decide what to do with everything in this room, we need to make it impenetrable.”

The ship hummed with recognition. “Bruce Wayne, would you like to assume command?”

There was a pained expression on Barry’s face, and he wiped water from his eyes and took a step into the garden. “C’mon, man, we don’t have to—”

“Yes, we do,” Bruce said firmly. Under other circumstances, this would have been a triumphant moment, but he could take no joy in controlling a Kryptonian vessel now. Not when there were no Kryptonians left to use it. “I would like to assume command. If there’s a lockdown procedure, start it. Nothing gets in, and for now, nothing gets out.”

“Very well. Lockdown procedures have been initiated.”

Arthur had already turned away, his trident hanging loosely by his side. Barry and Victor remained in the garden, and they exchanged looks that spoke plainly of defeat. 

Diana watched Bruce, and Bruce turned to give Clark’s mutated form a final long, solemn look. If he was destined to live out the rest of his life as a horrific plant creature, living or dead, he could do so peacefully in the garden. After all, he was Kryptonian, and his cells were as resistant to decay as they were everything else. Left undisturbed, the garden could preserve this form for the rest of eternity. 

Clark could stand watch over Metropolis forever.

“Cease irrigation indefinitely,” Bruce said quietly. “Turn off the rain and restore previous lighting settings. Change spectrums. Just turn off the fucking red light.”

He couldn’t even be bothered to issue an official command. Not when Clark stood there, watching with unseeing eyes.

“As you wish,” the ship said, and all at once the rain ceased. The room went dark as the lighting systems shut down entirely, then was illuminated again with a light that was too blue and bright; the remaining water droplets in the air shimmered like diamonds, and when Bruce was able to open his eyes without squinting, the sight took his breath away.

The last time Bruce had seen the garden in this spectrum, it had only been in its infancy. No flowers had bloomed yet, and much of the garden had been flat earth. It was the first time he’d seen the garden in its entirety, with its contents awash in the ship’s natural lighting, and where it had once been filled with foliage of various shades of black and red, it was now a brilliant sea of colour: knee-high neon ferns grew in brilliant shades of red and pink and orange, while deep greens and blues and purples coloured the squat stems of flowers and thick shrubs that occupied the furthest corners of the garden. Concentric rings of flower petals lit up near Barry’s feet as though a neon light had passed over them, glowing fluorescent blues and yellows and leaving brilliant orange pigments on his fingers as he leaned down and brushed his fingers over them.

“It’s beautiful,” Diana said softly, and Bruce realized that she had not yet left the room. None of them had; even Arthur stood on the platform just inside the door, gazing down at the garden’s freshly-watered contents with an expression of awe. Barry had a hand on his forehead, and Victor stood with a small, sad smile on his face.

“Yeah,” Victor said softly, “he is.”

Something gripped at Bruce’s chest, and he turned slowly to find that Clark too had changed with the light. The seed pods on their long stalks that had risen from his back were still black, but the leaves that swept down his head and back shone an iridescent purple-blue, while the flowers on his shoulders transitioned from pinks and yellows to aquamarine, with spots and striations and whorls of colour that Bruce had never seen on any living organism. There seemed to be no coherent pattern to the colours of the flowers, nor did the clusters even appear homogeneous; some petals were broad and brightly-coloured, some long and spindly with nonsensical colour gradients, and some petals looked as if they shouldn’t have even grown from the same structure. Water droplets caught the light and twinkled, giving him the appearance of something ethereal, something otherworldly, hauntingly beautiful.

It could never rival the sight of Clark’s smile, but it came close.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and before he could turn away another small, muted pop made him glance up. The last sporophyte had burst, releasing another cloud of small, reddish spores that fell around him like snow, and suddenly Bruce found himself smiling, too.

He’d always thought Superman’s memorial site to be unsuitable. It had been neat, crisp, undeniably elegant, but it hadn’t been Clark.

_If you seek his monument, look around you._

Bruce looked once more at the phone grasped in Clark’s hand. Maybe he could retrieve it at a later time. Clark might have left a final message. Something for his mother, or Lois, or someone else who had been close to him, someone who he might have felt more comfortable saying goodbye to. But Bruce had things to do before he could look through a crushed phone for goodbye notes, and it was with immense reluctance that he finally turned and began the slow, bitter ascent toward the door.

And then he paused.

The sound of soil being moved aside was, by now, a distinctly familiar one to Bruce. He wouldn’t have recognized it over the sound of the rain, but in the quiet of the chamber with only the retreating footsteps of his friends ahead, the noise made him look back. He hoped, in that moment, to maybe see that it was the sound of Clark uprooting, finding the strength to take another step forward, but Clark was as still as a statue, root-like arm still outstretched, his hand reaching toward the earth.

And there, just within reach, was a hand.

A small mount of dirt had been displaced in the empty space that Clark’s moss-covered hand pointed at, and at first Bruce thought that he was hallucinating, projecting human traits in his grief onto some thick, nightmarish stem that had erupted from the ground—but it _was_ a hand, with five distinct fingers and a wrist pushing up through the soil, and as Bruce watched the area around the hand began to bulge upward once, then again as a second hand pushed its way through the surface of the garden.

Bruce turned slowly and lifted a hand, gesturing at everyone behind him. “Wait. Wait, there’s...”

The mound surged upward. It looked as if the garden was in the middle of a deep inhale, and as the hands pushed outward to reveal dirt-covered forearms, the mound of earth split. Aghast, Bruce watched as a figure began to slowly pull itself out of the depths of the garden, clawing long trenches in the dirt as it dragged its body to the surface and slowly began to push itself onto all fours.

“Oh, my god,” Barry said.

“Don’t tell me we’ve gotta kill whatever that is,” Arthur said somewhere behind Bruce. “I didn’t come here to watch Superman die, and I sure didn’t come here to murder a plant.”

Bruce took a single step downward, then another. The figure looked up at him, squinting against the light; dirt fell from his hair as he lifted a hand to shield his eyes. Bruce felt something in his stomach turn over. Adrenaline rushed him, and he dropped to his knees before the figure kneeling in the soil.

“No,” he said without looking away, “it’s not a plant.”

It was Clark.

For the first time in a long time, Clark filled his lungs with fresh air.

He’d had this dream more times than he could remember, but this was the first time he had not startled himself awake upon breaching the earth’s surface. This was also the first time the dream appeared to be the real thing, which was as baffling to him as the fact that he was climbing out of a hole in the ground in the first place. Only minutes ago Clark had been awake, _truly_ awake, standing here in the Genesis Chamber while his limbs grew stiffer and stiffer, losing his strength and his voice and—

only, no, he hadn’t lost any of it. He hadn’t been standing here at all. Someone had, he was certain of that, but when he looked up at the strange, tree-like statue towering above him, he felt an odd sensation, a deep familiarity, as if he’d looked into a mirror and pondered his reflection for the first time. He remembered being that creature, remembered seeing himself slowly degrade in this garden, hidden away from the world… and yet he was here in the dirt, and everyone was here, and his dream was no longer a dream

“What happened?” he rasped, glancing back at the looming figure of Batman. A small service robot hovered nearby, paying him no mind as it moved soundlessly past and disappeared into a knee-high shrub with deep purple leaves, and for the first time Clark rubbed at his eyes and glanced at his surroundings. He was seeing it all for the first time, and yet he could clearly remember this garden from his dreams. He’d planted it himself, hadn’t he? “How long have I been here?”

“What the fuck,” Bruce said, and Clark found himself wincing away from the noise; with the added filter of the cowl, his voice was impossibly loud, distorted in a way that made Clark’s head pound. Everything felt off. Uncalibrated. That was what it felt like: everything was uncalibrated, just slightly off-centre, like it had been so long since he’d been able to sense anything that he no longer knew how to focus. He closed his eyes and shut everything out, and when he was able to let the world back in, he realized that everyone else had gathered around Bruce, forming a wall between Clark and the path to the door.

“Clark?” Diana asked, kneeling in the dirt. She sounded just as dumbfounded as Bruce, though she had always been more polite. “Do you remember what happened just now?” 

It took a moment for Clark to realize that she was holding a hand out toward him, and he took it gratefully, grunting as she helped pull him to his feet. It was difficult to stand, and when he attempted to grasp at the memory of when he’d last eaten or seen the sun it slipped between his fingers. All of his memories felt like a dream; he could remember seeing Diana enter the chamber prior to pulling himself from the ground, but the memory of it was like a bank of fog in an open field, swirling all around him, shapeless and incorporeal.

He steadied himself against Diana’s arm and closed his eyes, realizing only belatedly that he was still looking at them through his eyelids, a feat he felt that he had not been able to do in a very long time.

“I… I remember being here. The garden, I…”

He looked up, eyes open, at Bruce. He remembered Bruce. He remembered a flower shop; the expression of awe on Bruce’s face, illuminated by the light from the genesis tank; he remembered the way Bruce had gazed at him by the lake in Gotham, the way he’d smelled in the warm Kansas breeze, the look on his face when he’d discovered—

“What are you?” Bruce asked, snapping Clark back to the present. He had backed a few paces away and now watched stiffly, as if waiting for Clark to lunge at him.

“I… I don’t...”

He remembered the rustling of leaves by the lake, the gentle lap of the water against the shore, the soft creak of the wood as Bruce shifted his weight and drew closer. He remembered wishing that Bruce would kiss him, then a rush of panic, fear blooming hot in his chest.

“What the fuck is happening in here? Is this something you _planted_?”

Clark opened his mouth to respond, but before he could stutter out another helpless syllable, Victor said: “No, we did.”

He stepped down the walkway. His footsteps rang out hard and metallic, and Clark had to tune the noise out until it no longer made him dizzy.

“What does that mean?” Bruce asked. He looked at Victor, then at Clark, his eyes wild behind the cowl. “What—what does that—we as in _us_? Or we as in _you_?”

“Both,” Victor said. The light on his forehead flashed red-orange and a cloud of liquid geo assembled itself into a long, silvery sheet that draped over Clark’s shoulders. Belatedly, Clark realized he wasn’t clothed. “Clark, do you remember what happened before this?”

“I remember… dreaming about being underground,” Clark said. He swallowed. It was difficult to separate the dream from memory. “In Kansas. And I was here in the garden, but… I was here and not.” 

He remembered the dream so clearly, always the same—an eternity of darkness, then the hiss of rainfall, then the voices of the dead. He pulled himself to freedom every time, and every time he woke up—and now he controlled the dream.

“The rain I heard… it was here,” he said. “The voices I heard… I thought they were underground, but…”

Clark’s head hurt. He felt like he’d been dreaming for months, and yet he’d spent nearly a month above ground. He remembered that. He’d never pulled himself free of his grave. Someone else had taken him from it and he had awakened in this chamber, disoriented and… uncalibrated.

“I don’t get it,” Bruce said. Clark had the feeling he was not the only one who did not understand. “You’ve been dreaming about being underground, but you were… you were still awake? You were here?”

He glanced from Clark to the monolithic plant that stood over them, and Clark remembered how bewildered and appalled Bruce had looked on the night things had gone so terribly wrong… and then he remembered Bruce in his arms, stunned by the fact that Clark had rushed him away from a spray of nitric acid.

He felt nauseous. His memories felt like they were overlapping. They came unbidden, memories old and new, flooding him with information that felt familiar and unfamiliar all at once: Zod, the farm, an explosion, a ship buried in ice, a pile of soil, hydroponics, blood, Bruce, green gas, lilac, Victor, synthetic seeds, Bruce, lake, Bruce, Bruce.

Victor stepped closer still.

“I know it’s hard to remember,” he said, “but if you just focus, it’ll come to you, I promise. Do you remember what we did? What we said would happen if we got here?”

Clark closed his eyes again. He remembered losing his hair. He remembered Bruce asking about Lois. He remembered his knee breaking beneath his own weight.

“We… used the chamber,” Clark said slowly, clutching at the sheet that covered him. “We programmed the seed. Remember the suit?”

The suit. DNA. Clark’s DNA. 

“The plants weren’t the only thing we grew,” Clark mumbled, and Victor smiled at him.

“That’s the thing about these plants,” he said, looking at Bruce and Diana and Barry and Victor. “They don’t just grow and flower and die. The ship told us how they live, but it didn’t tell us the whole story. These things are living creatures. They _remember_. They share information and communicate just like people do. And when you zap someone’s regenerative cells with an energy matrix in the same amniotic fluid as a bunch of dirt and grass and mycorrhiza and all kinds of other living, breathing things…”

Another cloud of liquid particles poured into the air around them, forming a grey humanoid figure that melted into the familiar double helix of a DNA strands. Small pieces broke off and swirled into a larger helix, and suddenly two were side-by-side in a display that Clark remembered with nauseating clarity.

“I didn’t just learn how to communicate with them,” Clark said faintly. He became all too aware suddenly of his bare feet in the dirt, and a new memory came to him: the bone-deep satisfaction he’d felt after the first acid rain, the feeling of pleasure that he’d experienced as the plants began to feed and grow. He looked at Bruce, whose distress radiated from him in waves. “I became one of them.”

Diana nodded gently. She seemed to be taking everything in stride, and continued to hold Clark’s arm supportively. “But this doesn’t explain how you came to be here if this”—she nodded at the statuesque figure behind him—“was you.”

“Apollo,” Barry said suddenly, leaning back on his heels and looking at Bruce. It was a eureka moment, that much was obvious. “The Apollo story, remember? We thought all along—I mean, _I_ thought that _Bruce_ was the god and you were the hyacinth, but now _he_ —I mean, obviously you were Apollo all along,” he said, his voice rising from a stage whisper to a fevered pitch. “Clearly that was the case, it was so obvious, I don’t know why someone didn’t think to say it sooner.”

Bruce made a sound that was part cough, part indignant snort. “You thought I was the god?”

“Well, yeah, because you… you know,” Barry said, jerking his chin in Clark’s direction.

“I don’t know what—”

The chamber went silent as Clark closed his eyes and tuned them out. It was easy to shut down his senses, and it felt like the first time in a long time he’d been able to do so properly. It was so hard to think about everything with so many people bickering around him, trying to tell him bits and pieces of stories that didn’t yet make sense, and so he closed everything down and found himself in complete and total silence, alone in the dark, weightless.

_“Is this going to stop?”_

_“There is no known method for reversing the mutations in persons who have experienced genetic fusion,” the ship said. “Long ago, the council of Krypton forbade the creation of such wretched creatures, as it was discovered that their lives would be short-lived and full of hardships. There had not been such a deformity created in thousands of years.”_

_Clark lifted his arm and snapped one of the leaves from his head. A thick, reddish-brown sap began to leak from the broken edge of it, and Clark could feel it dripping down his scalp. “When was the last one created?”_

_“Nineteen months ago, by Alexander Luthor.”_

_A wave of sadness washed over Clark. A brief life of agony might have faced the mutated Zod on Krypton, but here on earth, he likely would have continued to mutate beyond recognition, unable to rely even on the mercy of death. And he would endure the same. Unless he and Victor found a way to stop this, his consciousness would eventually cease, and his body would live on, an empty shell._

“—Clark? Are you still with us?”

Clark opened his eyes. Diana was very close to his face, studying him intensely for signs of life or recognition, and he nodded a little and touched her arm.

“Yes,” he said, looking around at the group of concerned people gathered around him. It was hard to see these expressions on their faces. They hadn’t known whether he was alive or not, and had relied on a miracle to let them know whether there was anything left of Clark Kent. 

To be fair, he hadn’t quite known until now, either. 

“I think we can explain what happened,” he said, gazing at Arthur, then Barry, then Bruce. “Do you mind if I put some clothes on first?”

It took only a few minutes to ensure that the scout ship was entirely locked down, and another half-hour for Diana to find a replacement suit for Clark to don; in the interest of providing Clark with privacy, Bruce accompanied a floating service robot that seemed utterly indifferent to what had just taken place inside the Genesis Garden and was in the process of watering the sedge grasses that lined the hallways, including the section that had been singed by the phosphorus bomb. Victor had gone off to aid the scout ship in reconfiguring one of its rooms to create a suitable atmosphere for an emergency meeting where they could take a seat and converse in private; Barry had disappeared shortly after Bruce had given the order to enable every defense system the ship had, but he found Arthur standing guard outside the Genesis Chamber, staring through the transparent doors at the colourful display within.

He didn’t look away as Bruce approached, though he did shift his trident to his other hand to make room for Bruce in front of the door. 

“I said it was a bad idea to bring him back. You remember that?”

“I remember,” Bruce said quietly. The brilliant statue that was Clark, or _had_ been Clark, seemed disturbed by an invisible breeze; leaves and petals and colourful spines shimmered gently all around him, still shining with the water from the irrigation cycle, and the long seed pods extending from his back swayed slowly. Bruce found himself entranced, and forced himself to look at Arthur’s profile instead. “And without him, Steppenwolf would be alive and the world would be full of parademons and who knows what else.”

“And Clark would be completely fine back in Kansas. In the ground, maybe, but not… whatever this is.”

Bruce took a breath. “We still don’t know what exactly caused this to happen. It might have been something Steppenwolf—”

“You really are an asshole, you know? But you’re not that stupid. We’re directly responsible for that.” Arthur jabbed a finger at the doors, then turned and stared up at the ceiling with a sigh. He seemed resigned, not entirely relieved but no longer fully on edge. Bruce could relate to that. He wasn’t sure when he would have a full night’s sleep after this. 

After a moment, Arthur looked sideways. “How long did you know him before you brought him back?”

“Not long,” Bruce said.

Arthur nodded slowly and returned his gaze to the nothingness that arched overhead. “I met him before Superman was ever a thing. When he came back, I thought… maybe we _had_ done the right thing. Maybe we hadn’t managed to fuck it all up after all.” He gripped his trident and lifted it, then tapped it lightly on the ground, his gaze still fixed on nothing. “I knew we missed something. Of course we missed something, just using a fucking piece of alien technology like that. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Bruce grimaced, and Arthur looked at him again with an expression that looked precisely as somber as Bruce felt. “We were all just so wrapped up in our own shit. I can’t believe none of us caught it until now.”

Bruce reached up and removed his cowl. The humidity inside the garden had caused him to sweat beneath the suit, but he was certain that not all of the moisture that remained on his face had been a result of the climate.

After several minutes, a disembodied voice that did not belong to the ship echoed through the hallway. “Hey, guys, we’re ready down here. Come to the front of the ship so we can straighten things out.”

Arthur hummed in acknowledgement and pushed himself away from the door. He didn’t look back as he made his way down the hall, but Bruce couldn’t help but feel that there were eyes on him until he, too, rounded the corner.

“So this whole process, this… entire growth cycle, this was never part of the plan to begin with?”

Clark shook his head. He looked much better now that he wasn’t covered in soil and standing before them in the nude, but Diana had also insisted that he eat something to regain his strength before he and Victor began to recount the specifics of the plant-Clark involvement in Clark’s… well, resurrection no longer appeared to be the key concept. ‘Planting’ seemed too on-the-nose, and so they were left with something distinctly less pleasant to say aloud.

“Not until we knew for sure that the process would be irreversible.”

“I think in total the maturation took… what,” Victor said as he glanced at Clark, “three, four days from start to finish?”

Clark shrugged. He was wrapped in a sweater that Diana had found, and he held his arms close to his chest, hunching over in his seat as though protecting himself from the cold. “I don’t remember exactly how long it took, but the ship might know. Everything from the last couple of days kind of blurs together for me. I don’t know when I stopped being him and started being myself.”

They were slowly beginning to piece together the details of what had happened to Clark in the month following his return; so far, Bruce had deduced the most important details, which were that Clark had been irreparably changed after the Mother Box incident and that he had taken it upon himself to grow a new version of his body that had not had its DNA scrambled.

“Can you tell us about the seed you created?” Diana asked. She had taken the most gentle and sensitive approach by far. Bruce wished that he could do the same, but he was not sure that he could get past the nauseating thought of Clark slowly deteriorating inside the ship, too afraid to reach out and tell him. He simply kept his mouth shut and listened.

“I think it’s more complicated than creating a seed.” Clark rubbed slowly at his jaw, gaze fixed on the smooth grey table that they had gathered around. “The process wasn’t… I remember that there was a sample collection, a genetic filtration and recomposition stage, I don’t… I don’t even know where these words are coming from,” he said, laughing quietly in a way that made Bruce’s heart ache. “I feel like… I know these are technically memories that I made, but… it’s not all there yet.”

He looked at Victor, who folded his hands atop the table and leaned forward. “We had to remove everything that wasn’t Clark and find a way to deliver nutrients to it to encourage it to grow. Turns out Kryptonian tech was almost entirely geared toward manufacturing babies with highly genetics to fill specific societal roles, so it was actually kind of a smooth process once we decided to to use the amniotic fluid for its original purpose.

“Oh my god,” Barry said, screwing his face up. “So you were like, a literal fetus a few days ago? You basically had a birthday every few hours—”

“Can we—not talk about it like that? Please.”

Clark looked decidedly uncomfortable, and Bruce was inclined to agree with him. The idea of growing an entire human body—at least, a humanoid one—was a relatively new one for him, and it was hard enough to wrap his mind around the fact that the Clark sitting before him was not the same Clark he’d retrieved a house for, shopped with at Home Depot, gazed up at the stars with… and yet he was somehow,the same person, despite the fact that his body couldn’t have physically existed for longer than a week.

“Just focus on the important details,” Bruce said gently. He wanted to speak louder to convey how imperative it was that they remain on track, but something about Clark still felt fragile, and he couldn’t bring himself to raise his voice. “Give us the best timeline you can remember in the… days, weeks leading up to that, and Victor can fill in the rest.”

Clark scratched idly at his head. Bruce watched him, wondering whether he could still feel bark in place of his skin, whether there was some dissonance happening now that he was in a perfectly human body that had not been his since he’d been murdered.

“I remember… deciding that I had to do something once the condition had progressed far enough. The chamber, the Genesis Chamber used to be full of amniotic, uh, tools, things designed to nurture Kryptonian newborns until they could survive on their own. It was almost completely destroyed because of the crash, Zod… me… but I remember… I feel like there had to be a way to recreate that mechanism. Some way to safely incubate, or—or encapsulate something made of one cell or a few cells, and let it grow. Like Victor said, some of the Kryptonian tech was engineered to create genetically modified people, so after that, it was just about speeding up the growth process and ensuring that I still retained my memories.”

Diana leaned in, watching Clark with an intense expression. She must have been as concerned as Bruce. This was a difficult conversation to witness. “Did this idea come to you soon after your symptoms began to show? Is this why you decided to create a nursery in the first place? To conceal what was happening to you?”

Bruce wished he could have asked the same question. It sounded less like an accusation coming from Diana, and he preferred the way Clark responded to her.

“No, the garden was just an idea I had at first,” Clark said, then smiled sadly. “When I first found out what was happening, I tried to find a way to cure it, but I didn’t think about using my DNA in the chamber. Not until I remembered that story you told.”

“About Apollo and the flower.” 

“Nailed it,” Barry said, then covered his mouth with his hand. “Sorry. Keep going.”

Clark laughed a little. “I still don’t think it lines up precisely the way you think, but when you told me that he used blood to do it, I thought… maybe there was a chance I could use my own to… to use the Genesis Chamber for its original purpose one last time.”

“But you would have known about the genetic transfer,” Bruce said. “How did you know you could plant a seed like that and ensure that it wouldn’t turn out the same? Or worse?”

“The ship and I created a highly advanced purification process back when we were first clearing out the room, just like Clark explained. I’m talking separation of genetic material at the cellular level. If we’d tried to do the same to him at that point, it would have killed him, just like it would have weakened or killed him to extract the genetic material of the codex. But by isolating the non-Kryptonian genetic sequences and replacing them with the ones that made up his genetic code prior to his death, we were able to piece together the entire sequence, and that was all we needed.”

It felt like they were talking in circles, but midway through Victor’s explanation Bruce perked up.

“What’s the ‘codex’?”

Victor glanced sideways. “It’s—”

“—The piece of Krypton that I carry with me,” Clark said with sudden clarity. “It’s part of me, but it’s not important. What’s important is that Victor was able to help me find a sample of DNA from before the genetic transplant, and he was able to ensure that there was no DNA from any plant or animal from this planet in my current genetic structure.”

Bruce leaned back and sighed. It sounded simple enough, laid out like that, but he knew there was nothing simple about the things Victor was able to do. “How did you manage to find a DNA sample from—it would’ve had to be over a year old. Before you were buried. Where did you find a sample like that?”

“In my old suit,” Clark said, frowning at the table as if it had asked him the question. “Back at my mother’s house. There were these… there was blood. A small sample, but it was enough. And Barry was kind enough to get it for me,” he said, offering Barry a small, reassuring smile. “I really appreciate that. I know I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own.”

Barry pressed his hand over his heart and nodded, but Bruce wasn’t entirely satisfied.

“How do you know the blood was yours?” Bruce asked, narrowing his eyes. “You weren’t the only Kryptonian in contact with the suit.”

“Are you asking if it’s possible we used Zod’s genetic material?” 

“I’m asking if it’s possible you’re still not completely you,” Bruce said.

Clark gazed at him for quite a long time, and Bruce sat back in his seat and tried to imagine the fear and horror that he must have experienced. Bruce knew people who had lost their bodies and cognitive functions to disease and age, but at least their suffering had an end. Clark had experienced a slow decay of his mind and body and lived through it, and now had to live with the memories of becoming something he didn’t recognize. Bruce wasn’t sure he had the words to express how much he despised the idea of having to dispose of an endless line of imperfect Clarks, but for Clark to endure something so terrible a second time, a third, maybe more… he couldn’t allow that to happen.

“I don’t know for sure,” Clark said with a grimace. “The ship should know if something in my DNA isn’t Kryptonian, and Victor should have no trouble scanning me for anything else. Right?”

Victor shifted in his seat, staring pensively down at the table. “We would have known before the harvest if that were the case. I would’ve picked something up, or the ship would have.”

“The harvest?”

“That’s kind of the worst possible thing you could call it,” Barry said, prompting a nod from Arthur and a faint frown from Diana, whose expression suggested she already knew precisely what they were referring to. “Why would you call it a harvest? Why can’t you call it something, like… I dunno. Something that doesn’t make you sound like a seasonal fruit that you plant in the spring and pick when it’s ripe.”

Victor paid them no mind.

“Anyway, the ship would have picked up on any abnormalities or unexpected mutations,” he said. “Like I said, anything that isn’t part of Clark would have been filtered out or deleted from his genetic code. Even if I hadn’t caught it in time, the Kryptonian ship that was _designed_ to analyze Kryptonian DNA would have.” He turned toward Bruce, looking as though he’d just finished a well-organized thesis presentation. “Is that good enough for you?”

It sounded like the sort of fake science that one could find on a clickbait article in the sort of social media circles that promoted antivax propaganda. Bruce was still coming to terms with many of the things he’d once thought impossible. He’d grown close with a man who had never once trusted him enough to tell him the truth, and now that man existed simultaneously as a clone of itself and as a mutated plant-creature. Hell, Luthor had created an even greater monster out of someone barely larger than Clark. If Bruce could believe anything, it was that Clark and Victor would be diligent enough to ensure that the same mistake wouldn’t occur twice.

“It’s good enough for me,” Bruce said, straightening up. 

“But that leaves the question of his memories,” Arthur said. He had been listening keenly all along, but this was the first time he’d spoken up. “How did you know that you’d be able to get your memories back?”

“The ship and I engineered the seed so that it would conduct the electrical signals that the plants give out. Honestly, we didn’t even know that it would work for sure. We knew that if we timed it right, just when he became fully plant, he would start to communicate with everything else in the garden, and we just… hoped that his thoughts and memories, which are pretty much just electrical signals anyway, would be transferred from him to him.”

Victor nodded at Clark on the last word, and Arthur nodded slowly, seemingly satisfied with the answer. “Seems pretty crazy to do something like that based on hope, but… hey, as long as it worked this time.”

“It would not be the first time someone had done something crazy based on hope,” Diana said thoughtfully. She caught Bruce’s eye, her smile a microexpression of understanding.

Bruce inhaled and looked around the table. Most of their questions had been answered, at least for now. If Clark’s memories were still being sorted out, it might take a while for him to be able to answer for all of his actions, and Victor could always share his side of the story if they needed more details.

“Okay. All of that said… what should we do with him?”

“Why don’t you just… leave it in the garden?” Arthur suggested. “We don’t know that it’s going to just keep growing. It might be dying already, for all we know.”

“Nothing Kryptonian dies,” Bruce said quietly, watching Clark’s grim expression. “Not unless something Kryptonian kills it.”

Clark nodded slowly. “I’d love to keep him around, but… I don’t know if I could live in the ship for much longer knowing he was there with me. The thought of being in there with him just...” He shrugged and held his arms close to his body, slumping slightly in his chair. “I don’t know. I still remember things that I… we did. He’s still made of my body. My original body.”

There was a long silence. Arthur wrinkled his nose, and Barry rested his chin in his hands with a sigh. Diana seemed sympathetic, resting a comforting hand over the back of Clark’s as though she’d dealt with this situation a hundred times before, but all Bruce could picture was the worst; if Victor was wrong and some plant material still resided in Clark, it was possible that they would experience the same slow decomposition of Clark’s humanoid body and a slow, subtle shift toward the plant creature that had rooted itself in the nursery. Maybe they would repeat the process again, continually diluting Clark’s DNA over numerous quasi-clones until nothing remained of the foreign genetic material in Clark’s genome. At worst, maybe they would learn that such a feat was impossible to do now that the plant material had been introduced, and they would come to terms with the fact that any iteration of Clark would be forever tainted and doomed to the same horrific fate.

There were moral and ethical quandaries that Bruce was prepared to face, and this was not one of them.

“Why not find somewhere else to sleep?” Bruce suggested, but was quickly cut off by Barry, who asked: “What if you take it to Kansas?”

Clark blinked at Barry. “Kansas?”

“Yeah, don’t you guys have a massive amount of farmland there? Why don’t you take it back to, like, the corn fields? Let it scare off a few crows or something? If it’s Kryptonian and it’s not capable of dying, but it doesn’t want to grow anymore either, why don’t you just drop it off where you can keep an eye on it? Somewhere it might like to be?”

Arthur, who had slowly begun to slump in his chair, suddenly perked up. “Maybe he’s got a point. This thing was sentient enough to communicate with plants and people before, and obviously he was friendly enough to Dolly-the-sheep a whole Kryptonian dude made of his own DNA, so maybe it wouldn’t hurt to just let him hang out in the flowers? At least until something better comes along.”

“You mean let it continue to live surrounded by its own kind?” Diana asked.

Barry nodded enthusiastically, and Clark had a thoughtful expression that brought a new sense of unease to Bruce’s already unsettled stomach. Never mind lost sleep—this was an event that would take years off his life.

“We don’t know that he’s still sentient,” Bruce pointed out, attempting to race ahead of the conversation. “I don’t think it’s safe to assume that there is or isn’t anything Kryptonian _or_ human, left. We have no way of speculating on its sentience, unless you or Victor or Clark or anyone else can figure out how to communicate with this thing—which, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you recently come into some special abil—”

“—It’s sea, not space,” Arthur growled. “I can communicate with sea creatures, not plants. Definitely not alien plants from a different planet.”

“Have you had a good conversation with any kelp recently?”

Arthur rolled his eyes as Barry cleared his throat with a noise that sounded suspiciously like a nervous giggle, and Bruce learned forward in his seat and addressed Clark directly.

“We can find you somewhere to live until we figure out what to do with the… other you. But we can’t leave him somewhere that’s easily accessible, and that includes the ship. You already know the danger those plants pose, and that was before one of those plants turned out to be you. We can’t afford to tip anyone off by moving it right now, and while planting it out in a wheatfield somewhere sounds like a good idea, we still don’t know that it won’t corrupt the ecosystem or that it won’t continue to grow uninhibited, or even worse. We don’t know anything about it.”

“Except that it gave Clark a second chance at living,” Victor said. “Listen, maybe you didn’t spend much time with him, maybe you didn’t know what was happening, and that’s okay. _I_ did. I think that out of anyone here, I would be the better judge of character. Or better yet: Clark, what do you think?”

Clark inhaled slowly, then raised his gaze and met Bruce’s eyes. “If you ever trusted me, or who you thought to be me…” he said softly, tipping his head forward as if to share a secret, “then maybe we can still trust what’s left of him.”

Bruce could think of no better response than to grit his teeth and sit up a little straighter.

Arthur hummed thoughtfully, glancing back and forth between each member of the group sitting at the table. “So… I guess we vote on it?”

“I’m not leaving this to a vote. We can’t afford to let anyone get inside that garden, full stop. If those spores get out, if the people who—”

“Yeah, who are these people, anyway?” Arthur asked, narrowing his eyes at Bruce. “You mean Lex Luthor, who you locked up in Arkham Asylum? Steppenwolf, who got his head knocked off and probably has worse things to worry about than a couple of seeds?”

“People like Lex Luthor could do more damage while incarcerated than people often give credit for. You forget that I’ve been doing this for a lot longer than you have,” Bruce said, “and you don’t know the sort of people I have stopped in the past. I’m talking about people like Dr. Isley. People like the—that thing Waller found in Louisiana.”

“What thing?” Arthur and Diana asked in unison.

Bruce sputtered impatiently. “There’s a—he’s—it’s not important. My point is that there are powerful people, metahumans, and… hell, you know Waller herself would have a field day with this. That version of Clark, sentient or not, could be incredibly dangerous in the hands of that woman and her agency. In the hands of someone as sadistic as Lex Luthor, or as—for Christ’s sake, Poison Ivy controlling any Kryptonian plant could mean the end of the world. Does that mean nothing to any of you? Is that a risk you’re willing to take, Clark?”

Clark gazed at him for a moment, then glanced around the table. “I think a vote is a good idea.”

Bruce sat back in his chair and nodded curtly.

“Well, I think it would be cool to have around, and I like Arthur’s idea about letting it talk to other plants, so… my vote’s for relocation, I guess,” Barry said.

“Same,” Arthur agreed.

Victor tapped a metal finger against the table. “I mean, containment isn’t a bad idea, if there’s a chance that someone will try to use him,” he said after a moment. “Maybe I’m biased, but I think it should be used only as a last resort… and only if we can’t safely relocate him to a place where he can’t do any harm. Unless you think hiding his suffering from people that he cared about so that he wouldn’t hurt them further made him a grade-A threat, I’d like to let him be free.”

“Could you communicate with him?” Diana asked Victor. “If, as you say, the electrical signals of this flora can be interpreted as a language, could you theoretically still communicate with him?”

“I guess it’s possible,” Victor said hesitantly. “But theoretically, if he isn’t sentient and doesn’t understand concepts like good and bad…”

“Then you can determine for yourself whether he poses a threat or not. I was a friend of that version of him, too. I would like to believe that he is still capable of good, just as you are,” Diana said, smiling gently at Clark.

It was Clark’s turn, and he took a moment to acknowledge Diana’s warmth with a small nod. “I’d like to believe so too. I just don’t know if… I don’t know. I guess I just want my ship back,” he said with a quiet laugh. “But I don’t want to hurt him. Sentient or not, that’s still a part of me back in that ship. Under all those flowers and vines and everything else, there’s a body that’s still me.”

“You shouldn’t let that cloud your judgement,” Bruce said.

Victor swung his head in Bruce’s direction. “Can you confidently say that yours is totally clear and unbiased right now?”

He might as well have lifted a hand and pointed directly at Clark, but he simply stared at Bruce, waiting on an answer, and his message came through loud and clear.

“Okay, then we’ll try to communicate with him. Assuming we’re successful, maybe we can ask him where he wants to go and send him there… but only if he’s still alive and capable of communication.” Bruce turned his attention to Clark just as Clark began to push his chair back; at any other table, the legs would have scraped against the floor, but nothing in this ship worked the way Bruce expected it to, and Clark rose in unsettling silence. “You want to try now?”

“No. Can I speak with you in private?”

His face revealed nothing, and Bruce had no reason to say no. 

Besides, if this was Clark—the real Clark, not the Clark that he had corrupted, altered—this would be the first time they’d spoken face to face since before the funeral. 

Before everything.

Clark led Bruce to the cockpit of the ship. The city would have been visible all around them, if not for the massive facility that still enclosed the ship, but it meant that they had the benefit of being shielded from view while maintaining full visibility of the surrounding city. Clark’s vision had returned, and at last he could see beyond the walls of the ship, could hear the sounds of the city turning over in its sleep. It was still only twilight but the sky was beginning to brighten on the horizon, casting a dull light over Heroes Park, and Clark knew that sunrise would come soon, peeking over the horizon and bathing Metropolis in the first golden rays of the morning.

“I feel like I’ve been stuck in a dream for the last few weeks,” he said softly. Bruce was still behind him, but he knew that Bruce was simply waiting for him to speak. “I know that I… um, that version of me… he dreamed, too. It was the same dream that we had, over and over, always in that same coffin back in Kansas. And we would always try to climb out. It was the same dream every time. We always managed to make it out, but… I never stayed asleep long enough to see what the world was like when I got out.” 

He turned and gazed at Bruce. Bruce, who had planted seeds with someone who was not yet fully himself, someone who possessed memories that were not fully his own; Bruce, who had bought bags of fertilizer for a garden that he disapproved of, yet encouraged, and who had gone behind his back and asked Victor to analyze a sample of his DNA because he lacked personal boundaries, and because he was paranoid, and because he cared.

He’d brought Clark back from the dead. Someone who didn’t care wouldn’t have done that.

“And here you are,” Bruce said.

Clark smiled a little. “Here I am.”

He felt somewhat self-conscious, standing here in an old sweater in front of Bruce, who had come dressed for a fight. It had been a long time since he’d been so unsure of himself, but he knew that it would pass. His memories, foggy though they were, would eventually fall into place. He was already remembering more of what had happened in that month. The version of him that had grown fond of Bruce had passed on those memories, too.

Clark drew closer.

“So… does this mean you’re starting off fresh? With Superman? The League?”

Clark took a breath and pulled his hands out of his pockets. He ran his fingers through his hair, and experienced the distinct and unique pleasure of knowing that there wasn’t a single strand missing.

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can start over from. It’s not like I forgot everything. I know what I did. How I felt. All of those thoughts, feelings… all of that hard work you put into trying to get me to trust you,” he added with a faint smile, “they’re not quite clear yet, but they’re there. So it wasn’t all for nothing.”

“Thoughts and feelings about...?” Bruce was watching him with an unexpected intensity. He didn’t look uncomfortable, but Clark found himself unable to decide quite what Bruce was feeling, so he let himself listen a little more closely. Bruce’s blood pressure was moderately high, but he still had some room before it entered dangerous territory. 

Clark grinned at him, giddy with the sudden realization that his senses were no longer restrained.

“You know he wanted to protect you, Bruce. When everything started going down, he didn’t let Victor tell you. He didn’t want you to blame yourself for all of this.”

Bruce seemed to contemplate that for a moment, clearly confused by the disparity between Clark’s expression and his words. There was a noticeable increase in his heart rate for several seconds, and he looked beyond Clark at the city that surrounded them until it began to slow. “Well… I can’t say it was mission fully accomplished.”

“I know.” Clark stepped closer. He could feel the heat from Bruce’s body through the armoured undersuit. It was the same one he had planted seeds in, a stripped-down, skin-tight version of the Batsuit, and Clark was quite sure he would never get tired of seeing Bruce wearing it. “But everything that happened to him led to me. If it wasn’t for him, if it wasn’t for… the smoke grenade prototype that Victor stole from your lab,” he said, laughing softly, “he wouldn’t have been able to fix this.”

“I wondered where you got that idea,” Bruce murmured. His breath was warm against Clark’s cheek, but if he had any reservations about Clark’s proximity, he didn’t show it. “Using phosphorus for garden growth. Smart move.”

“I had a lot of help,” Clark said, and then he was tired of waiting. He tipped his head up and kissed Bruce, and in that moment he felt the first distant warmth of the morning sun on his face and Bruce’s hand against his jaw and gravity’s loosening hold, and he knew that things were going to be okay.

Inside the Genesis Garden, Victor knelt in the dirt and listened.

It made a strange sight, all things considered: Clark stood near the plant that had once been him, surrounded by a lush jungle of alien shapes and scents that had only ever needed a gentle push to flourish, and Victor pressed his palms into the soil, bracing himself over the empty hole that Clark had crawled from as new appendages unfolded from his back like many long, multi-jointed branches and sank into the dirt around him. He looked like a robotic spider, or a devotee praying before an altar.

Next to him, Barry bounced on the balls of his feet.

“Alright,” Victor said, glancing up at Barry. “Let’s see if he can understand.”

Barry took off in a spray of dirt as the indicator light on his forehead flickered from blue to orange, and with his brow furrowed in concentration Victor began to crackle with the same blue electricity that Barry was beginning to encircle them with; Clark watched as he ran the entire circuit of the garden, over and over and over again, digging ruts into the dirt path that wound through the chamber and divided the rows of plants. The room began to glow with it, and next to Clark, Bruce took a breath and watched with obvious trepidation.

“Just wait,” Clark murmured. “He’ll be able to do it.”

The light within the chamber began to flicker and dim, and as Barry continued to run Victor’s many arms began to discharge, too, acting like lightning rods that directed the electrical energy into the earth at the base of the Clark-plant.

Then, all at once, the ship’s lights went out, and the chamber was illuminated solely by the sparks that Barry was still discharging. Clark held up a hand to signal him to stop, and when he skidded to a halt the sparks flickered and died, leaving only the red-orange glow from Victor’s body.

Arthur said from a few feet away, “Ooh, that doesn’t seem good.”

Clark held his breath and waited. Even without a source of light he could see the look of concentration on Victor’s face. 

Thirty seconds passed. A minute.

“C’mon,” Barry whispered in the dark.

As if on cue, Victor glanced in Clark’s direction, and a soft glow began to fill the chamber, emanating from hundreds, thousands of tiny light sources on the ground and in the air around them. The lights glittered like stars, shining on the reflective surfaces of Diana’s sword and Arthur’s trident and even the amniotic tank and illuminating the grins that had slowly begun to slide over their faces. Barry, too, spun in place in the garden, wide-eyed and delighted by the sight.

“I think that’s a yes,” Victor said triumphantly. More of the lights winked into existence even as he spoke, and soon the entire chamber was alight, an entire night sky contained within a single chamber.

“It’s the spores,” Bruce said, his voice filled with an unexpected veneration. Clark could see the soft points of light reflected in his eyes, lending his expression a near-supernatural beauty. “He released spores when he finished growing.”

He leaned closer to Clark, and somewhere out of sight, down in the space between them, Clark could feel Bruce’s fingers curl around his own. There was no exchange of items this time, no promise given in the form of something material, tangible, but Clark was sure that they no longer needed that excuse; Clark leaned against Bruce in return, nudging him gently with his shoulder before resting his head against it, his heart surging with warmth as his friends murmured with wonder in a chamber that would never again bear rotten fruit.

**Author's Note:**

> And now, some minor thoughts!
> 
> ❀ Title and general premise taken from that classic Bible verse as delivered at the end of Batman v Superman: "The dead shall live, my slain shall rise again. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is like the dew of the morning, and the earth shall give birth to her dead." (Isiah 26:19) Could I have been more heavy-handed with it? Perhaps not. Am I satisfied with this incredibly literal interpretation? You bet.
> 
> ❀ Despite what the general themes of destruction and subsequent regeneration, rejuvenation, etc., and the presence of an actual, literal secret garden suggest, this was not inspired by The Secret Garden—nor, unfortunately, by DC Universe's Swamp Thing, which I have yet to watch but am incredibly excited to finally view in its entirety. I did spend some time looking into the Floronic Man (who I believe actually _is_ in Swamp Thing), and did take some inspiration from his physical characteristics in the comics.
> 
> ❀ A certain amount of the aesthetic inspiration (and some of the insidious existential dread) came from the flora/fauna mutations presented in Annihilation (2018), alongside the Apokoliptian flora from Justice League. I wanted the change to be gradual and inevitable, and for the doomed version of Clark to make peace with his existence while also proving Bruce wrong about the intentions of Kryptonians. (The improvised phosphorus grenade was just a coincidence).
> 
> ❀ When a garden is full of fictional alien plants tended by a man with little gardening experience, nobody can tell me that I'm writing about it all wrong.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Art] that dwell in dust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20101165) by [TKodami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/pseuds/TKodami)




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